Sustainable Music

Ruled for dollars and cents

2012-01-21T20:04:00.000-05:00

The sustainability discourses, as I’ve written earlier, are strongest in ecology and economics; and the two are not unrelated. That is to say, economists map scientific views of the natural world onto the economic world, and vice-versa. For example, according to intellectual historian Joel Kaye, the rise of empirical science in 14th-century Europe was likely the result of a craze for measurement made necessary by the monetization of society—the rise of a currency economy, which impacted the scholastics in the universities who, as a consequence, began observing and measuring the natural world (Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century [Cambridge University Press, 2000]). Conversely, in the 18th century, economic theory was influenced by concepts borrowed from science (natural philosophy), as Margarat Schabas argues in The Natural Origins of Economics (University of Chicago Press, 2005). For example, the idea that electricity was a fluid led classical economists to the idea that money flowed through the economy, while gravitational forces were translated into market forces.

Disentangling the two discourses, particularly when, as noted, they rely on the same word root (oikos = household), is a perpetual struggle; they seem to be in constant attraction, as two particles, one with a positive and the other a negative charge. And so today they mingle in concepts like heritage tourism, where heritage represents either a music-cultural ecosystem, or a natural one; and where money from cultural tourism or ecotourism is meant to sustain them.

Even Thoreau, despite trying to live a simple, thrifty life free from materialism, had a hard time keeping the two realms apart. He left us his ecological observations in 37 notebooks—his journals, a priceless legacy. And yet, as he observed, in his essay “Life without Principle,” “I cannot easily buy a blank book to write thoughts in; they are all ruled for dollars and cents.”

Sustainable Futures

2011-12-25T21:06:00.000-05:00

        As noted in the previous entry, at the 2011 SEM conference I was at last able to meet and speak with the music educator Huib Schippers, the founder and director of the remarkable Australian-based international project entitled "Sustainable Futures for Music Cultures." This ambitious project happens to rest partly on concepts that were introduced more than 25 years ago in the first chapter of my book, Worlds of Music (1984; and in four more editions since): the concept of the music culture (brought to the chapter by Mark Slobin), and an idea which as far as I know I was the first to conceive, namely that a music culture functions as an ecological system, or ecosytem. Sustainable Futures "acknowledges that there are serious challenges to many music cultures that are the result of recent changes in 'musical ecosystems.' Based also on a commonly-voiced analogy from cultural conservation work, that certain music cultures constitute endangered resources, it 'seeks to counteract the loss of music cultures by identifying the key factors in musical sustainability, and making this knowledge available to communities across the world. In this way it aims to empower communities to forge musical futures on their own terms'" (http://musecology.griffith.edu.au/).

    The project acknowledges continuity with earlier attempts at musical and cultural conservation, and "aims to identify ways to promote cultural diversity and ensure vibrant musical futures in line with those called for by organizations like UNESCO" (Ibid.) Such aims have, of course, been under discussion in this blog since I began it in 2008; but in the US they go back at least to the 1970s which saw the creation of three major federal agencies devoted to cultural conservation: the office of folklife studies at the Smithsonian Institution, with its festival of American folklife; the National Endowment for the Arts, with its folk arts division, and the American Folklife Center, at the Library of Congress. Where the Sustainable Futures project appears to differ from the earlier conservation efforts, though, is in methodology. Rather than direct action in the form of either support to artists, or funneling funds into projects meant to help communities maintain musical traditions; rather than supporting heritage spaces such as festivals where those musical traditions are presented for communities and tourists alike, and rather than forging direct partnerships between ethnomusicologists and other culture workers with communities to work toward mutual goals of a sustainable future for music, this project is a study meant to produce a cultural resource for communities who wish to take command of their own musical futures. It is devoted, first, to studying a select number of music cultures with a focus on aspects thought crucial for sustainability; and second, to establishing a template or set of suggestions, based on that study, that would be shared with communities seeking a sustainable future for their music.

    Another of the distinguishing aspects of the Sustainable Futures for Music Cultures project is its systematic approach to problem-solving. Schippers has designed the study so that the music cultures are being examined in five overlapping areas: musical content and structure; learning and transmission of music; social and cultural contexts of musical traditions; the infrastructure including those "spaces" where music is made, real and virtual, as well as various laws and regulations that affect music within the culture; and finally, the audiences, media and markets, for "most musicians and musical styles depend on communities, audiences and/or markets for their survival." Each of the music cultures under examination constitutes a case study, and of course they will differ in regards to the way they populate each of the five areas; nonetheless, this systematic approach is meant to yield information and a template that will be broadly applicable. The outcome is meant to be both an on-line space and a book or manual. Using the website, communities wishing to take action would be able to do a self-assessment to see where they fall in terms of those five areas, and then learn strategies for musical survival in specific circumstances that relate to their own. The book or manual would guide culture workers and help inform partnerships between them and community members seeking sustainable futures for their music cultures.

    This summary just scratches the surface of the project, which has been running since 2009 and will conclude in 2013. It is generously funded by the Australian government, but the case studies examine music cultures not just in Australia, but all over the world (none, however, in the US, perhaps because the US is not a signatory to the UNESCO treaty on safeguarding intangible cultural heritage) and they involve partnerships with researchers, consultants, universities and organizations in several different nations.

    In conceiving the project, Huib Schippers sought guidance from ethnomusicologists Tony Seeger, one of the prime movers of the UNESCO initiatives; Deborah Wong, then president of the Society for Ethnomusicology; and a number of others active in the International Council on Traditional Music, which is the strongest organization of its kind outside of the US. He learned about my work and in the summer of 2009 he contacted me, saying that he was going to be at the 2009 SEM conference and would like to discuss the project with me. Unfortunately, our meeting had to wait until last month, because I had accepted an invitation to lecture in Beijing on music and sustainability at around the same time as the 2009 SEM conference, so I could not attend it. But he sent me information about the project, and then when we did meet we had an opportunity to discuss it.

   Huib Schippers and I confirmed that we had many thoughts in common, and that for me it has been exciting to see some of them implemented in such an ambitious way. He asked me if I would like to serve on their advisory board, and I said I would be glad to do so--albeit that the project had already been underway for 2 years--and then, after I returned from the conference, we continued our conversation by email. He invited me to come to Australia at some point next fall to spend a week or so consulting on the project, and in principle I accepted, although we must still work out a mutually convenient time. I told him that I was already contextualizing it within my own knowledge of related initiatives (in the US) in musical and cultural conservation and their history, unable to help myself in making comparisons. I reiterated that after spending a few decades doing applied ethnomusicology I was now at the stage where I wished to draw back and attempt to theorize it; as he knew, my thinking had since 2005 been focused on music and sustainability. I said that I was apt to be critical of certain aspects of the Sustainable Futures project, and was that what he wanted? He affirmed that he did, and that constructive criticism was always welcome. To me this is a promising development; and I look forward to contributing in whatever way I can, while undoubtedly learning a great deal to put to use in working out a theory of music and sustainability, within the field of applied ethnomusicology.

Music and Sustainability in Philadelphia at the SEM Conference

2011-12-24T20:42:00.000-05:00

    The annual Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) conference was held last November 15-19 in Philadelphia, with implications for music and sustainability. Three aspects of that conference were very encouraging. I will comment on two of them here, and save the third for the next entry.

    First, SEM devoted a plenary session to an applied ethnomusicology project. The SEM president, Gage Averill, moderated a panel devoted to a recent anthology of writing on HIV/AIDS education through music in Africa, a project begun several years ago by my dissertation advisee, Gregory Barz, who has been teaching at Vanderbilt for some years and who discovered that the most effective way to get the word out in Uganda about how to prevent HIV/AIDS was not through leaflets, government media, clinics, or public forums but through music--specifically, song texts that educated people about the disease and how to guard against it. Observing that women already were spreading the word on a small scale about HIV/AIDS by making up lyrics about it, as song lyrics traditionally carry news and gossip, Barz more formally initiated a program to encourage HIV/AIDS education through song in Uganda, and the idea caught on throughout the continent, to the point where it has now become public policy. Barz coined a term to describe his work, "medical ethnomusicology," and with a single stroke named a new subfield within applied ethnomusicology. But more important than nomenclature by far is the good work that he and his colleagues have been able to accomplish. The anthology, just published by Oxford University Press, is edited by Barz and Judah Cohen, and titled The Culture of Aids in Africa: Hope and Healing through Music and the Arts.

    Second, as co-chair of SEM's Applied Ethnomusicology Section, I'd invited and convened a roundtable presentation, "Sustaining Folk Arts in Philadelphia," to be facilitated by Debora Kodish, director for 24 years of the Philadelphia Folklore Project (PFP). SEM chose the plenary session and our roundtable as two of only a dozen sessions that they videotaped and streamed live during the conference. They have been archived and may be viewed at http://www.indiana.edu/~video/stream/launchflash.html?format=MP4&folder=vic&filename=society_for_ethnomusicology_20111118_1.mp4

    The Philadelphia Folklore Project is a grass-roots metropolitan non-profit organization who, in their own words, are "committed to paying attention to the experiences and traditions of 'ordinary' people. Our focus is to build critical folk cultural knowledge, sustain vital and diverse living cultural heritage in communities in our region, and create equitable processes and practices for nurturing local grassroots arts and humanities" (http://www.folkloreproject.org/about/). The PFP works with community scholars and directors of various cultural groups in the Philadelphia area, implementing a very pragmatic cultural policy guided not so much by principles of cultural conservation as by a dynamic vision of future possibilities. Debora brought three of those directors to the roundtable, and in answer to her questions they explained how the communities went about creating major ongoing musical, dance, and theatrical projects in the African American and Asian American communities.

    Borrowing here from Debora's language describing it, in the roundtable we explored the possibilities of engaged practice (applied ethnomusicology and public interest folklore), with a focus on how partnerships between community organizations and publicly-engaged scholars can reshape roles, issues, theories, and practices. The three directors of grassroots groups in Philadelphia, encouraged over the years by the PFP's enlightened cultural policy, shared examples of how they have used traditional arts as part of advocacy and outreach/organizing strategies to sustain vital communities in the face of draconian development strategies and challenging social issues, and how folklore and ethnomusicology theory and practices have supported these efforts. Lois Fernandez discussed the work of ODUNDE, a ground-breaking African American festival. Ellen Somekawa discussed the work of Asian Americans United, an activist organization that created the 15-year-old Mid-Autumn Festival and Chinatown's Folk Arts-Cultural Treasures Charter School. Dorothy Wilkie discussed the Kulu Mele African Dance and Drum Ensemble, Philadelphia's longest-enduring African dance and music ensemble.

   The PFP is one of the most, if not the most, successful community organizations of its kind. One interesting reason for its success is that instead of attempting to impose folkloric purity and academic standards of authenticity on the ethnic groups whose initiatives it encourages, it recognizes that to have any real life, the expressive forms of culture must arise from within the groups themselves, even when these forms appear to be inventing new traditions rather than continuing and reviving old ones. The idea of folkloric authenticity has its own peculiar history within Euro-American culture, and it is simply not congruent with the creative dynamics of tradition, the way (to take one of the clearest examples) African diaspora peoples have for hundreds of years drawn on the old in constructing new expressive cultural forms. This point was something that the National Endowment for the Arts, Folk Arts Division had a hard time understanding, back in the 1980s, when deciding not to fund grant proposals for support of celebrations like Kwanzaa, an invented tradition. (Kwanzaa was created and named by Maulana Karenga in 1966 as a holiday to bring African American communities together and celebrate a communitarian African heritage.) The ODUNDE festival, while not wholly invented, also falls into the category of those intentional celebrations to which a revivalist stigma attaches. Yet its intentionality combines with grass-roots cultural knowledge to give it the kind of vitality that bespeaks continuity within African diaspora community expression, and PFP's decision to embrace it, rather than discourage it in favor of something more past-oriented, reveals PFP's understanding of how authenticity works within African diaspora cultures.

   Oorganizations such as the PFP stand as examples of interventions on behalf of cultural sustainability that have taken place in the US during the past 40 years, some more successful and some less so. A more global perspective would be useful, and to some extent the UNESCO initiatives on behalf of safeguarding intangible cultural heritage are meant to fill that void. But another project, one which came to my attention in 2009, the Sustainable Futures for Music project, directed by Huib Schippers at Griffith University, in Australia, falls squarely into that global category. He was hoping to meet me at the 2009 SEM conference, and discuss his project with me then and there; but as I was in Beijing at the time, lecturing on music and sustainability at the Central Conservatory of Music, I didn't go to the conference and so didn't get a chance to meet with him. He sent me some information about the project, and in the meantime I was hearing about it from other scholars who understood that we had interests in common; and so we resolved to get together at the next SEM conference that he would attend. That was last month, and it is the third aspect of the conference that I want to bring up. I will do so in the next entry.

The limits of green

2011-11-29T21:25:00.001-05:00

What is the relation of music and sustainability to the humanities? I’ve been thinking about this subject for a few months now in preparation for a lecture in the University of New Hampshire’s Saul O. Sidore Lecture Series (March 21-22, 2012). The theme of this year’s series is “Sustainability Unbound” — unbound, that is, from “the limits of green,” as their poster puts it. (Go to http://www.sustainableunh.unh.edu/sustainabilityunbound#.TtV7NkyCbQw for information on this event.)

The context is this: the University of New Hampshire has a Sustainability Academy with faculty and outside fellows; it funds programs and curricular initiatives, monitors sustainability research, and tracks various UNH programs, centers, and institutes related to sustainability. Along with the UNH Center for the Humanities, they are sponsoring this lecture series. Five of us are to lecture at this two-day event which is open to the university community and the general public, and we are to explore the relation between sustainability and the humanities. We are, besides myself: Melissa Lane, a professor in the department of politics at Princeton, who is concerned with sustainability in ancient Greece and has focused attention on Plato's Republic; Lewis Hyde, whose work I’ve mentioned before in this blog, a professor at Kenyon and Harvard and a Macarthur Fellow. His book The Gift (1983) takes up many of the themes I’ve been concerned with over the decades in my own research; his most recent book, Common As Air, is a defense of our cultural commons. The other lecturers are Enrique Leff, a Mexican philosopher, economist and environmentalist; and Carol Mansour, a Lebanese/Palestinian filmmaker. I will be very interested in sharing ideas with them and with the UNH faculty, students, and general public.

What then, I wonder, do they mean by the limits of green? What first comes to mind is this: that there is more to living “green” than doing one’s part in conserving energy and recycling, which I suppose is how most people think of being "green." My university has a “Brown is Green” program which concentrates those two activities. Many colleges and universities have sustainability initiatives ranging from this sort of thing to attempts at making the entire campus sustainable in terms of energy use, with solar and wind power supplying all the electricity for example. Berea College, where I taught as Goode Visiting Professor of Appalachian Studies back in 1990, moved early in this direction, not only "greening" their campus but establishing an eco-village within the College featuring a permaculture forest, edible landscapes, ecologically designed buildings, and so forth. I find this interesting in that when I was a professor there, the College owned the oil-fired power plant which generated electricity for the entire city of Berea, Kentucky. If you lived in Berea, you paid your electric bill to the College. Your sewer and water bill, too. A quick check on the Internet reveals that Berea College Utilities is still in business, having merged with the city government only a few years ago. I could not find how much renewable energy the utility used to generate its power. Perhaps someone connected to the College will read this and let me know.

Another way to think about the “limits of green” is by considering what the humanities can add to a discourse that has been informed chiefly by the natural sciences (ecology) and the social sciences (economics). But one needs to recognize immediately that humanities thinking is already on board. Conserving endangered species, for example, is often justified both on instrumental and ethical grounds--and ethics is a traditional concern of the humanities. Here, it may be helpful to separate out two strands of “green” science. One is the ecological study of the natural world using objective and value-free empirical methods. (I will leave aside for the moment the powerful critique of scientific objectivity that arose in the second half of the twentieth century.) The other is the ecological study of the natural world guided explicitly by principles of justice, applying them to all species (including humans). This latter is a kind of applied ecology, putting ecology to practical use, and is usually termed conservation biology or conservation ecology. It provides a scientific basis for the ideology of environmentalism and “living green.” But it is also deeply grounded in the values of the humanities.

The past as past... or present?

2011-10-31T23:55:00.000-04:00

    Sustainability thinking is present and future minded. The "uses of the past" in the present and future are many. That is the nature of applied work. As readers of this blog know, I'm interested in acoustic ecology, and in the place of sound in the biocultural evolution of life on this planet. As a historian I'm interested in the past as past--what it was like, for example, to live in the sound environment of a medieval French peasant. But as an applied ethnomusicologist I'm curious about that sound environment not only because I'm interested in the acoustic experiences of a French peasant in the past but because I want to know how understanding that sound environment might help us develop policy regarding sound in the present and future. Although it's a pleasurable thought experiment to imagine myself inside the world of Martin Guerre, I wouldn't want to dwell there.
    And what if I found a stringed musical instrument buried in a medieval French peasant's grave? My first questions, of course, would be how was it made, how was it played, what did it sound like, and how was it used? I might take measurements and see if I could construct an instrument very like it. (I would want to preserve the original for study, in its original state.) In that regard I am interested in the past as past. But when I begin to conjure up the medieval French sound world I am always comparing it with present-day soundscapes, just as I do when I read and imagine Thoreau's soundscape descriptions of Walden or a mid-nineteenth century Massachusetts farm.
    I began thinking about this in response to a series of talks on vernacular architecture as history, at the American Folklore Society conference a couple of weeks ago. In particular, Jerry Pocius and Thomas Carter both lamented present-day folklorists' disinterest in doing folklore and architectural history, period, let alone doing it the way they did (and still do): take meticulous and accurate measurements, imagine what it was like to use these objects and live in these spaces, and use oral history as a way to get at the past as past (not as it bears on the present). Pocius and Carter attributed the problem to what I've called "the ethnographic turn" to interpretation in folklore (it was the same in ethnomusicology and cultural anthropology), a turn that emphasized synchronic studies, ethnographic presents. After the ethnographic turn, the past was important chiefly insofar as it illuminated the present.
    I suppose most North American folklorists contemplating the history of folklore would say that this ethnographic turn rescued folklore and finally gave it a subject, expressive culture, that was not disappearing (or had vanished) with peasant ways of life. Folklore's preoccupation with the past as past seemed a problem to many American folklorists beginning in the 1960s. The University of California, Berkeley folklorist Alan Dundes famously wrote about the "devolutionary premise" in folklore studies, that folklore had always existed more fully in the past, when it was integrated into daily life; today what we have are fragments and survivals. Folklore, in other words, was always in a state of decay, disintegration, and devolution. Folklore was a disappearing subject, constantly receding, needing to be collected up and archived before it vanished entirely. The eminent folklorist Albert Lord, my friend and colleague from Harvard when I taught folklore at Tufts, represented this view well. On first learning that I studied folklore in the United States, he wondered aloud and only half-jokingly whether, without peasantry, there could be any folklore in the United States at all. What he meant was that it had degenerated; as an example he mentioned that the guslars (epic singers) that had been recorded in Chicago were incompetent in comparison to those he and his teacher Milman Parry had found in Yugoslavia forty years earlier.

    In the United States, our generation's answer to this devolutionary problem was to emphasize ethnography rather than history, to redefine folklore as expressive (aesthetic) culture, and to make new theoretical models from process and performance more than from genre and text. Yet for some folklorists this ethnographic turn made texts all the more important. It did for me; my fieldwork documentation in the 1970s and succeeding decades was even more meticulous than it had been, as I was interested in grounding theory in actual texts. Thinking of a text as any object of interpretation meant that one had, after all, to have an object before it could be interpreted; and it would be good to know that object as much and as carefully as one could. Hence the fieldwork; hence the measurements that had to come before the interpretation.
    And now here were friends and colleagues of my own generation lamenting this ethnographic turn, wanting today's folklorists to understand history once more. As they indicted ethnography and fieldwork, I was puzzled. I'd always attributed the ethnographic turn to my generation's personal response to doing fieldwork, as we turned away from collecting and survey work and towards long-lasting relationships with the people whose expressive culture we were learning about, and whom we were learning from. I thought about Henry Glassie, sitting there in the audience, whose meticulous work on folk housing in Virginia had served as a model for Tom Carter, Jerry Pocius and many others. Glassie's Virginia work was not without theory, either; structuralist analysis, based on the binary oppositions that worked so well for Levi-Strauss, revealed the meanings of these vernacular structures. And yet, after completing this work, Glassie moved to rural Ireland and although he still made his meticulous measurements and wonderful drawings of buildings and other artifacts, the book he wrote based on his stay, Passing the Time in Ballymenone, drew most of its considerable power from the way he represented people, his new friends, telling stories of local history and making history meaningful in the present--and future.

On the origins of "giving back"

2011-09-29T23:46:00.000-04:00

It's a good idea to differentiate the "giving back" under discussion here from the "gift of culture" exemplified by certain humanities agencies. And good, also, to ask about the origins of this "giving back."

I recall my surprise and pleasure at reading a review by Loyal Jones, nearly 30 years ago, of a documentary vinyl 2-LP set that Ken George and I recorded. It was published in 1983 by the University of North Carolina Press and featured singing, preaching, praying, witnessing, and storytelling from a community in Virginia's northern Blue Ridge Mountains. Jones, then director of Berea College's Appalachian Center, pointed out that although this enterprise had been funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities, it was in fact the reverse of the usual humanities effort. Instead of bringing the light of high culture to the less well educated, as Jones characterized most humanities initiatives, the recording brought the powerful expressive culture of a less formally educated group to a university press audience. Another way of looking at it is that the university-educated world was offered a gift from a group of people who represented something that the former world was unaware of, did not have, and might possibly learn something from. That both Greil Marcus and Dave Marsh put the recording on their Ten Best Albums of the Year list suggests that they thought the general public might learn something too.

For Jones, what might be learned were Appalachian values and virtues, a subject he spoke on often. Modesty was one of them. He recalled that when Halley's Comet reappeared in 1986, a reporter from Washington looking to interview someone who'd remember the last time the comet passed by, in 1910, came to the mountains of western North Carolina, where she thought she might find a suitable nonagenarian. By happenstance she turned up at Jones's homeplace, where his aged grandmother still lived. After announcing the subject, she asked Jones's grandmother if she remembered Halley's Comet from 1910. "Well, yes," Mrs. Jones replied, slowly. "And did you see it?" the reporter excitedly asked. "Well, yes, but only from a distance." Modesty, or humility, is one of the virtues that university humanists might learn from a people who were educated in their homes and communities to know and respect tradition, even if they did not always follow its example.

Recognition of this reversal is, perhaps, the origin of one impulse toward cultural anthropology. Why study the "other" otherwise? But giving back to the other, reciprocity, does not and did not necessarily follow. Experience suggests that it usually originates through personal encounters, personal relationships and friendships. Here is a little-known example. In 1881 Alice Cunningham Fletcher made a trip to the Sioux reservation as a representative of the Peabody Museum, to live there and study them. While living there she befriended Francis LaFlesche, an Omaha who became not only her principal consultant and co-author but, later, her adopted son. Folklorists, anthroplogists and ethnomusicologists know that she was the first woman president of the American Folklore Society, and a pioneer among the 19th century ethnographers collecting and interpreting Native American music. But her work in "giving back" is not well known. In fact, she developed an institution for making small loans to Native Americans to help them buy their own land and houses. One of those loans helped put the first Native American woman through medical school.

This is largely a lost history, the history of "giving back," though why that is so is not clear to me. It would be wise to recover it if we can. Fletcher, it turns out, stands as a relatively early example of a group of "woman amateurs," travelers, collectors, interpreters and popularizers, whose reputations suffered greatly in the hands of later academic historians. Fletcher's efforts at aiding Native Americans are characterized today as attempts to Americanize them, a "grievous error in the administration of Native American lands and peoples" (according to a Smithsonian Institution author, at http://www.nmnh.si.edu/naa/fletcher/foreword.htm). Ethnomusicologists consider it unfortunate that the Omaha songs she collected were published with Western harmonization, added to them by the musician John Comfort Fillmore, who convinced Fletcher that these harmonies were implicit in the Omaha melodies. With hindsight, today's historians fault Fletcher for failing to respect the integrity of Native cultures. But Fletcher was a person of her times and is best understood, I believe, in light of the prevailing climate of opinion regarding treatment of Native Americans. The alternative to Americanization, after all, had for nearly three centuries been to exterminate them and confiscate their lands. And prominent American composers such as Edward MacDowell were quoting, transforming, and harmonizing Native American melodies in their musical compositions.

Ironically, Fletcher's impulse to give back by helping Natives assimilate into American culture has something in common with humanities councils' initiatives to bring high culture to the general public; yet an arm of official culture today considers the one a "grievous error," while the other remains federal and state public policy.

Friendship, "Giving Back," and the Price of a Creative Economy

2011-08-24T13:29:00.000-04:00

    About ten years ago John Fenn, interviewing me on the subject of applied ethnomusicology, asked why I thought so many graduate students in his generation were interested in it. I told him I thought they weren’t satisfied with the traditional circulation of knowledge inside the intellectual communities of the colleges, universities, museums, and archives; and that they felt, after getting to know the people whose music they were researching, a desire to “give back” something to those people and the music cultures they were not only learning about but learning from. (For that interview, see John Fenn, "A Conversation with Jeff Todd Titon," Folklore Forum, Vol. 34, nos. 1 and 2 [2003], pp. 119-131. A free download is available at: https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/handle/2022/2361?show=full)
    “Giving back” is the way they phrase it now, and it’s also the way those of us in my generation did when engaging in the kinds of reciprocity that distinguished us from previous academic generations. As I said in that interview, I was “giving back” to the blues musicians I hung out with long before I even knew what fieldwork research or ethnomusicology was, for reciprocity is the way friends normally behave with one another. The gift exchange of giving back isn’t noblesse oblige, the way humanities institutions typically think about their public mission, to bring culture to the uncultured. It is reciprocity, a gift quid pro quo. The bluesmen I hung around with in the 1960s—Lazy Bill Lucas primarily, but also JoJo Williams, Baby Doo Caston, Lee Rogers, and Mojo Buford—were freely giving me their music, their thoughts, their time, their soul food. I’d learned to play blues guitar in high school and played it in college but I don’t think I really learned it until I started making music with these musicians, first jamming with them in their apartments and then eventually joining Lazy Bill’s band. And I was learning about the blues music culture, too: how to be in the world as a blues musician like them. These were priceless gifts to me, and I wanted to give something back if I could.
    But what? Maybe, I thought, I could help their careers by generating some publicity for them. I interviewed each of them about their lives in music and got these published in blues fan magazines, notably Blues Unlimited. This led to three record contracts for Bill, and many more gigs, including an appearance at the 1970 Ann Arbor Blues Festival, for which Bill earned more money than he ever had been paid for any job in his life, before or since.
    Although this could be regarded as “pay back,” because we each did help each other's careers, and that brought money in, I preferred to think of it as an example of a gift exchange. Making music as we did is a social activity in which musicians give to each other; these gifts enforce the gift-giving nature of friendship among musicians. They’d have given me these things whether I tried to help their careers or not. I’d have tried to give back in other ways if I could—and I did, in bringing food, transporting them around town on occasion, and so forth, the kinds of things friends do for each other anyway.
    But looking back on it, I now understand it as both a gift exchange and a commodity exchange; some of each, and both can be seen as investments in the future. It is difficult to talk about exchanges, even gift exchanges without talking in economic terms; but I trust that there is more to economics than commodity exchanges.
    In the so-called creative economy (see the blog entry for Feb. 19, 2011), when cultural policy increasingly becomes an arm of economic policy, where is the place for the unmerited gift, given and received, that is music (or any art, for that matter)? Economist David Throsby argues that art has a cultural value which transcends its price. Yet Throsby's arguments in favor of the creative economy all are use arguments which assign commodity value to music. And so while the music in the creative economy may be viewed as partaking of both gift and commodity exchanges, the price of emphasizing the latter is to risk atrophy to the former.

Gift exchanges and "giving back"

2011-08-14T11:57:00.003-04:00

    Ethics is a major concern today in the fieldwork research-based disciplines of cultural anthropology, folklore, and ethnomusicology. Each discipline’s professional society—the Society for Ethnomusicology, the American Folklore Society, and the American Anthropological Association—has, on its website, one page or several devoted to a statement of ethical principles by which its members abide (or ought to). The major feature of these ethics statements is a respect for the rights of our subjects—those people we work with and learn from. Beyond respecting their rights, many of us want to “give back” something to these people and their cultures, musical and otherwise, who have given so much to us. It’s helpful to think of this giving, and giving back, as gift exchanges.
      I’ve written and spoken a good deal about gift exchanges, about art as a gift, and about the difficulties that arise when cultural policies treat such gifts as commodities. It’s time to consider this giving and giving back as part of a gift economy, one which lies alongside our economy of commodity-based exchanges. I want to think about this in the context, also, of Veit Erlmann’s response to my public lecture at the University of Texas at Austin last February, when he took exception to my thinking about gifts and gift economies, citing the work of Jacques Derrida on the meaning of gifts in defense of his position.
      Marcel Mauss was the cultural anthropologist who opened the topic of gift exchanges, taking certain indigenous societies and various rituals of giving such as potlatch as examples. Mauss’s point, often forgotten, was not that in these societies gifts are freely given with no expectation of anything in return. Rather, as in the potlatch, receipt of a gift puts the recipient in a position of deep obligation to the donor: a gift comparable or greater must be returned. Michael Polanyi, in The Great Transformation, extended the topic to gift exchanges in pre-capitalist, pre-industrial (but not pre-market) Europe, in the medieval period. As in classic Marxian analysis, the important aspect of economic exchanges has to do with the kind of relationship that obtains between the people doing the exchange. In the commodity exchange, a legal contract binds the participants, but there is no personal relationship and no expectation of an exchange in return (unless the contract is violated). In the gift exchange, on the other hand, while there is no legal contract, there is a moral obligation that binds donor and receiver in a personal relationship that continues after the exchange. Derrida, characteristically eccentric, proclaimed that a gift was not truly a gift unless the donor remained anonymous to the recipient. Of course, with that kind of gift any relationship between donor and receiver is severed because the donor is unknown.
      Derrida’s proclamation calls attention to one kind of gift, and to the idea that distinguishing gift from commodity exchanges is, after all, a Western idea. In my experience the central notion of a true gift is that it is unmerited, not that it is anonymous. The donor gives without the expectation of receiving anything in return. This is the gift of music, or the gift of any art: the composer, the musician, the artisan does not deserve the gift, does not expect it. They are prepared for it and are open to receiving it but do not demand it, do not require it, do not think it is owed to them. Once received, however, it carries with it a sense of obligation. As Lew Hyde writes, in his book The Gift, the relationship now requires that the gift be used, not squandered; that it be returned, usually in a larger form, or that it be passed along. Above all, a gift may not be sold or discarded.
      Derrida's insistence on the anonymity of the donor in a true gift may apply to the gift of artistic creation, when the donor's presence is felt but not known, as when a musician feels that artistic creation is effortless, something that is being received as a gift while the artist is not actively forming it as the artist brings it into the world. As I wrote in the Introduction to my book, Old-Time Kentucky Fiddle Tunes, there are times when playing music that one feels as if the instrument is playing itself, or playing the musician, rather than the reverse. One's usual sense of agency is absent.
     On the other hand, many artists have identified the donor of this kind of gift with God. This is why Derrida's analysis can take us only so far, for in this case the donor is known. And, of course, it would be hard to overestimate Protestant Christianity’s influence on the idea of the gift in Western culture: the idea that Jesus’ death was God’s gift to an undeserving humankind. God’s grace, in other words, stands as an important model of, and for, the gift in Western culture. The idea that the Creation was God’s gift, in the sense that God’s hand was manifest throughout in its orderly pattern, constructed the Western idea of Nature from medieval Europe well into the nineteenth century. God stood behind Nature’s economy, gradually receding as the centuries wore on; yet even Darwin saw God’s trace, if not grace, within the natural world.
      Today it would be unusual to find a cultural anthropologist, folklorist or ethnomusicologist who would say that their desire to “give back” arises from Christian doctrine and ethics. Pressed for principles, they would defend it on the grounds of human dignity, inherent individual and cultural rights, updated principles of European and American cultural democracies rooted in Enlightenment philosophies. Alan Lomax’s phrase was “cultural equity.” Equity means fairness and impartiality; interestingly, like so many other terms that connote values, it also has meaning in economics, the world of commodity exchanges. One builds equity in a house; and a company’s total value of issued stock shares constitutes its equity, hence the phrase “equities” for stocks. Time and again the attempt to separate the world of the gift, and gift exchanges, from the world of commodities, and commodity exchanges, runs afoul of the way we habitually think of value. It is the same with “giving back,” as much of what the applied ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, and public folklorists give back has commodity value—indeed, most of it. That will be the next topic.

Musical Cultures, Climate, and other Complex Systems

2011-07-27T12:45:00.002-04:00

    In the last post, I mentioned that one contemporary application of ecology is to the management of complex systems. A complex ecological system is characterized by changes that are predictable in a general way—that is, as a trend or tendency—but where prediction is difficult or even impossible in single specific cases. Under such conditions, where general disturbances and perturbations are highly probable, but just when and where is difficult to predict, managing for resiliency appears to be the best sustainability strategy. These ideas must seem very abstract to the general reader. A chance encounter with an interview on National Public Radio a few days ago (July 25, 2011) gives me an opportunity to try to make these ideas more concrete.
    The subject of the interview was climate change. Now climate (and weather) is a good example of just such a complex system that I’m writing about. So, by implication, is the ecological system that is a music culture, but for now let’s confine ourselves to something that “everyone talks about but nobody can do anything about” — climate and weather. In fact, of course, we must do something to manage it if we are going to lessen the horrific consequences of climate change in the coming centuries. We have a chance to decrease the amount of climate change due to carbon emissions and greenhouse gases; and we have a chance to manage our adaptations to whatever climate change occurs, instead of just submitting to it.
    Weather, as everyone knows, is an example where predictions are “probable” and “likely” rather than certain; and where accuracy varies according to how soon the event is to occur (the sooner, the more accurate) and how local the observations are. You look up at the sky and see a storm approach; soon you hear thunder. Rain is very likely within the next five or ten minutes and you’d best close your windows (unless you live an air-conditioned life). You consult the daily weather report that says a thunderstorm will occur; nowadays the forecasters use mathematical models to predict the storm accurately, in a given location, to the hour, but this proves less accurate than direct and immediate observation. And yet it has value for planning. Forecasters predict even more generally that there is so much percentage chance of precipitation during a given day. And most people are aware that the longer range forecasts are less accurate than the short range.
    What was interesting to me about this interview was how and why the interviewer and the expert talked past each other. The interviewer was Terry Gross, an experienced interviewer who has spoken with scientists, social scientists, writers and artists on her NPR show “Fresh Air” for decades. The scientist was climatologist Heidi Cullen, a writer and lecturer on climate change, a professor at Princeton and author of the book, The Weather of the Future. The questions Gross asked were, I think, questions that most people are asking about climate change and specific weather events. Gross asked the expert whether climate change was responsible for this summer’s unusually hot weather, or for last spring’s bad floods and tornadoes. She asked whether there might be an upside to climate change for people in places like Philadelphia, her home town, for if it got warmer then there could be less snowfall and because she didn’t care very much for snow, that would be a good thing.
    Cullen’s replies seemed evasive. Yes, she said, human beings’ activities in the past couple of centuries, notably their release of fossil fuels into the atmosphere, have certainly caused climate change, and with this climate change certainly comes more extremes in weather—more hurricanes, more severe rainstorms, hotter heat, colder cold, more flooding, and we had better be prepared for it. But Gross wanted to know with certainty, or at least a reasonable amount of it, if this year’s unusual floods in the midwest, and tornadoes in the southwest, and the extreme heat that settled in the midwest and east this past month, breaking all kinds of records, were the result of climate change—or were they just instances of the “normal” kinds of weather extremes, the notable ones that have occurred throughout human history? And Cullen could not answer to her satisfaction.
    Why not? Again, because climate and weather are complex systems, in which predictions are probabilities, not simply cause and effect. Geologists predict that there will be a big earthquake in California in the next fifty years, but they can’t say just where although they predict probabilities based on fault lines. Nor can they predict just when. The same with climate change. Scientists know that human beings have changed the climate by burning fossil fuels with gases released into the atmosphere that have caused global warming and trapped more moisture. Scientists know that as a result, on average, severe weather events will increase in number: there will be stronger storms, more severe floods, hotter heat waves, colder cold waves, more damaging tornados, heavier snowfalls. Weather extremes will be greater. What they can’t say is that this one particular extreme weather event certainly was caused by climate change and that without climate change it would not have occurred.
    Gross found Cullen’s answers frustrating. Yes, Cullen said, in the changing climate Philadelphia was going to get warmer; but Gross’s hope for less snow would not necessarily be realized, for climate change was circulating more moisture in the atmosphere, with stronger storms as a result. After all, as long as the temperature was below freezing, this moisture would come to earth in Philadelphia as snow, and there might be more of it. Gross was not happy to hear her hopes for less snowy winters in Philadelphia dashed, and less happy still to live in the uncertainty that they might even be snowier. She turned to another subject: early spring. Surely there was an upside to the fact that spring seems to be coming earlier these days; she hates winter. Now the flowers are blooming sooner, and the grass is green sooner, and she can put away her winter clothing sooner and be more comfortable. Well, Cullen replied, the early warming is also responsible for more rapid ice melt in the mountains; the ground cannot absorb it so quickly and it results in floods like the ones that have occurred in the past decade. The implication was that early bloom and sooner put-away winter clothing was a trivial gain compared to the losses from catastrophic floods.
    What was interesting to me in this dialogue was not so much Gross’s inexperience with the kind of climate thinking Cullen engaged in on a daily basis, as her inability to put her mind into Cullen’s framework of complex systems. It is easy to say that in Philadelphia Gross experiences the natural world as someone who lives and works in a city, probably indoors most of the time, where climate is controlled, and that is why there was such a disconnect. But I think there is more to it than that. Gross is used to thinking about weather and climate—and many other things—in terms of direct causes and effects. In fact, of course, that is how we experience the world from one moment to the next. We type on a key and expect to see the letter appear on the screen. We turn on the gas on the stove and expect to see the flame and feel the heat. We turn the key in the ignition and expect the car to start, even though we know that many things have to be set in operation, whether in the computer, the stove, or the automobile.
    Complex systems thinking is something we engage in, if we do so at all, when our normal understanding of cause and effect breaks down. The appliance doesn’t operate as it should—why not? It could be this, it could be that; we “troubleshoot” and suddenly become aware of the many things that could be causing the problem, some individual and some in combination; and we imagine that there might be other causes that we don’t know. This is not an easy way to think. I know some people who are good at it, and some for whom it is as foreign a country as Mars. But it is the kind of thinking that is involved in managing for sustainability, whether we are working out strategies for resiliency, or diversity, or anything else; and whether we are attempting to manage the natural world, social organizations, household or national economies, or music cultures.

Resilience

2011-07-21T19:19:00.007-04:00

    When I was in Portland, Oregon last February at the round table with various musicians, musicologists, acoustic planners and city arts managers I was struck by something one of them, Tim DuRoche, said when he introduced the term “resiliency” and suggested it might be a better way of thinking than “sustainability.” Tim spoke about resiliency in ecological terms, saying that while sustainability implied preservation, he wanted to manage the arts for growth and change. He spoke about improvisation in music (he is a jazz musician as well as an arts administrator) as adaptation, with resiliency a key component. I embraced that idea, commenting that “resiliency” is a term that has emerged in contemporary ecological thought, to describe management strategies for complex systems where mathematical modeling and predictability is difficult if not impossible. I added, though, that in ecological thinking today, sustainability is allied more with adaptation and resiliency than with preservation.

    Resiliency planning is a strategy for protection against unpredictable disturbances in (and to) nature and against the law of unintended consequences. It arose from a critique of the ecosystem paradigm, a way of thinking about natural worlds that stood at the center of ecological thought from 1935 when Arthur Tansley coined the term "ecosystem" until about 1970 when the critique gained traction. In my 2009 essay “Music and Sustainability: An Ecological Approach” I had noted the part of this critique that is directed at equilibrium theory in ecosystems, but I maintained that four principles from conservation biology/ecology, the principles of limits to growth, diversity, interconnectedness, and stewardship, should guide cultural policy planning for music cultures. After all, conservation biology/ecology developed beginning in the 1970s, just as the critique was making its force felt. What I had not done was explore the extent to which that critique affects those principles, nor why that critique made me think of a kind of sustainability that tilts away from preservation of cultural heritage and towards adaptation and change, the same conception that Tim DuRoche alluded to when he spoke about resiliency. And since that conversation with Tim and the others in Oregon it nagged at me that I had not done so, and that perhaps I had not yet gotten it quite right, either. I resolved to take up this line of research again this summer after the teaching semester was over. As I did so, a number of questions resurfaced, ones that I want to explore further in blog entries during the next several months.

    First, the critique. Two of the linchpins of twentieth-century ecological theory were challenged beginning in the 1970s and are largely discredited by ecologists today. One is the idea, associated with Frederick Clements in the first decades of the 20th century, that forests and other natural units, when left alone as “wild nature,” pass through successive stages toward a diverse, stable, mature, and final or “climax” stage. The second is the idea, implied by Clements’s notion of succession and climax, and associated with the influential mid-twentieth century work of ecological scientists Howard and Eugene Odum, that mature ecosystems are those in which organisms, populations, and communities exist in a dynamic equilibrium characterized by energy flows and cycles (modeled mathematically) governing birth, growth, decay, and regeneration. These two ideas not only constituted the scientific discipline of ecology but also guided conservation efforts and environmental management in the last half of the twentieth century, and provided scientific grounding for what those who write for the general public sometimes term “nature’s way” or, more often, “the balance of (wild) nature.” But today's ecological scientists no longer believe in climax theory, nor in ecosystems whose normal state is dynamic equilibrium, nor in a balance of nature.

   I make a distinction between ecological science and environmentalism. The latter is an outgrowth of the conservation movement, and it involves many stakeholders besides ecological scientists: naturalists, conservationists, eco-tourists, policy makers, organic farmers, ecocritics, landowners, and those within the extractive industries such as mining, forestry, and agriculture that wish to use and renew natural resources, not use them up. Indeed, ecological scientists are not necessarily part of the environmental movement and many have strong reservations about it. Conservation biology is a branch of ecology that is very much a part of the environmental movement, but most ecological scientists are not conservation biologists. Most lay environmentalists today still believe that nature “naturally” moves towards balance; but ecologists no longer share that belief, while their research also questions the basis for correspondence between diversity and stability in ecosystems. Indeed, the ecosystem concept itself, which once ruled ecology, is no longer at the center of the discipline. How did this happen, why did it happen, and what does it mean, for ecology, environmentalism, and sustainability? Where do conservation biologists stand on the matter? Where has ecological science moved in response to this critique, what is the center of the discipline today, and what are the implications of this change for musical and cultural sustainability? Have the four sustainability principles from conservation biology/ecology been undermined or strengthened by this paradigm shift, and how might they be modified to suit the brave new ecological world?

    A number of other questions relate to the changing nature of ecological science. How, for example, has the post-structuralist, postmodern critique of science impacted contemporary ecological thought? Is a post-normal science of ecology possible? Is it desirable? What might it be like, and is it worth doing and worth wanting? And how, for example, has the new type of literary criticism, called ecocriticism, impacted literary theory? What is the relation between ecocriticism and deconstruction, and what are their implications for ecological science, environmentalism, and musical and cultural sustainability? What is the relation between the “balance of nature” and “nature’s economy?” What is the history of these ideas and how old are they—how did they develop and when did they take their present form? Does the pastoral tradition (in literature, art, and the humanities), a genre of nature writing and representation, involve a “balance of (i.e., in) wild nature” or is it, rather, directed more toward a harmonious relationship between nature and humankind? What are the implications of chaos theory and complex systems analysis for ecology, ecosystem management and, by extension, for cultural management and sustainability? How has the “evolutionary turn,” the return to Darwin and his principle of natural selection, impacted contemporary ecological thought; is there a place for evolution in ecosystem thinking today? And what is the place of ecosystem ecology in contemporary ecology? Finally, what can we learn from developments in soundscape theory about acoustic ecology? What does contemporary research in the sounds made by insects, birds, and whales, for example, tell us about all of these things, about sustainability and nature’s economy, balance, evolution, music, language, ecocriticism, antirealism, the natural world, and the human? These are some of the questions I’m anxious to explore in the near future.

Southern Soundscapes

2011-06-14T19:20:00.029-04:00

        Tom Rankin, an old friend and colleague who is director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, invited me to lead a class in the seminar he was giving last semester, on sacred space in the South. After I accepted, Patricia Sawin, the director of the curriculum in folklore at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, asked me to piggy-back onto the trip a lecture for the folklorists and American Studies group there. And so the latter week of April found me in North Carolina for three very pleasant days of conversation with old friends and new, and a guest seminar and lecture. A college campus is never lovelier than in the spring when the carefully landscaped pathways are a-bloom with pinks and whites and golds, the scents of fresh flowers enter through every pore, and the birds cavort and sing out their love of place. Everyone alive to the seasonal transformation walks around with a spring to their step. Conversations with Dan and Bev Patterson, Tom Rankin and his wife the fiction writer Jill McCorkle (Marta and I stayed at their wonderful farmhouse), and with Bob Cantwell at supper after the folklore lecture were especially stimulating; Tom and Patricia were splendid hosts, and I could see how, under Patricia’s perceptive leadership, and with help from some of those in American studies (including Bill Ferris, the former head of the NEH, whom I was glad to see again) the folklore program at Chapel Hill will be in good hands for he foreseeable future. For that lecture, I gave an overview of the music and sustainability project as it now stands. There are many rooms in this music and sustainability house, and I tried to lead them into each one of them and show them around, probably going too fast in some spots and lingering too long over others. By now readers of this blog will know something of the rooms and their furnishings.
        For Tom’s seminar, I presented on the topic “sound sacralizes space.” An entry to this blog on with that very title, a few days ahead of the seminar, summarizes what I spoke about. The topic is sound, a topic that encompasses music, at once shifting the subject from music to all sounds and soundscapes, and simultaneously emphasizing the “sound” aspects of music-making that are not usually given as much attention in musical description and analysis as the structural ones such as form, melody, rhythm, and harmony, or the cultural aspects that we ethnomusicologists pursue so vigorously. That is, the subject shifts to emphasize performance, reception, and aspects of sound such as timbre or tone quality; to the relationships between speech, chant, and song and the apparent boundaries between them; to the way sound is presented to consciousness; and to the way sound is in and affects life on the planet.
        I have written in earlier blog entries about acoustic ecology and the work of Bernie Krause, and his evidence for acoustic niches in the natural world. Recently on SEM-L, the listserver discussion group sponsored by the Society for Ethnomusicology but open to the general public, there’ve been several posts from people dissatisfied with the name “ethnomusicology.” Some proposed “sound studies” instead and, predictably, this was endorsed by a few who were interested in the subject, and dismissed by several who felt that with its history and the institutional gains made by ethnomusicology in the past fifty years, it should not be abandoned in favor of a new name that would be unfamiliar to most, while it did not even describe the subject that they were most interested in.
        Count me among those interested in sound studies, of course. I don’t think we have to give up the name ethnomusicology to situate some of our studies in the worlds of sound. Ethnomusicologists can study people making music, and we can also study it within the larger compass of sound studies, along with the acoustic ecology of the natural world, which humans are a part of.
        Recently I was reading in Thoreau, a naturalist who was especially alive to the soundscape. In later editions of Worlds of Music I’ve dwelt on the term (soundscape) in the first chapter, in presenting music within the compass of sound; and I quoted Thoreau’s description of a farm soundscape in Walden. Indeed, chapter 4 of this book is titled “Sounds” and is devoted to a description of sounds heard around the environs of Walden Pond. I also pointed out the justly famous passage from that book where Thoreau remarks on the daily intrusion of the train into the tranquil Walden scene, and pays attention to the soundscape as well as the landscape, describing the iron horse with its snort like thunder, and the smoke billowing from the engine “stretching far behind and rising higher and higher, going to heaven while the cars are going to Boston…” In all of his writings Thoreau is remarkably observant of the natural soundscape; his ears were open as well as his eyes, and he counted on sound for knowledge as much as sight.
        By Thoreau’s time, the (white) man of the woods belonged to history, celebrated by James Fenimore Cooper in the person of Natty Bumppo, or the legends of Daniel Boone, reduced in the twentieth century to unintentional parody in Disney's Davy Crockett. But in Thoreau’s soundscape, the old idea that truth comes by hearing was given new voice and new form. There was a time in the pre-postmodern critical era when orality was a subject of much interest, the writings of Walter Ong especially, on the transition in Renaissance Europe from a predominantly oral (speech, song, hearing) culture to a written (sight, readling, writing) one. The manuscript and then the book, of course, figures mightily in this history. This topic was of considerable interest to folklorists, who trafficked then primarily in oral literature (song, myth, folktale), and to those cultural anthropologists such as Dennis Tedlock and Dell Hymes, who were fascinated by the performance of oral literature, which was inseparable from sound and gesture.
        And so the topic of sacred space is very Thoreauvian, but I see it also in the context of sound studies. It was in this intellectual atmosphere in the 1970s that I became interested in such things as the chanted and sung sermon, and sought to document and interpret these, and their sound effects, so to speak. For Tom Rankin, who is a visual documentarian and photographer, sacred space may be primarily a visual space; but he is not tone-deaf—in fact, he is a very perceptive listener and his documentation and interpretation projects have involved music as well as images.
        One question I thought about for that seminar was what, if anything, was special about sacred space in the southern US, in the South as a region. Southerners, of course, have for at least 150 years felt that the South was special; and I have experienced that heightened sense of place-awareness among some in that region. But I’ve also experienced it elsewhere—in the upper Midwest, and in Rhode Island, and as intensely in down east Maine as in the mountains of southeastern Kentucky. The cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan termed it “topophilia,” or love of (one’s) place, and wrote a book with that title.
        And so the South is not unusual in having place-awareness; but what is it about its place-awareness, the way it constructs its place, its sacred space, that is unusual? Here, I think sound plays an important part. The sound of the preacher’s voice, the sound of lined-out hymnody, the sound of the old gospel music, the way sound sacralizes space, even in secular contexts, is not found in the same intensity elsewhere in the US. The number of fiddle tunes, for example, from the upper South, named to evoke specific places (and people) and their aura; the stories that memorialize those people and places when traditional musicians play those tunes—this is not the same in other parts of the US, where fiddle tunes today are a means to a different end, contest prize money rather than memory and evocation of the spirit of person and place, the “genius” of the place as it was termed in the England of Milton’s time, a practice that continues in the traditional music of Scotland and Ireland, and one that doubtless took root in the American South with those who migrated from there and spread that musical mind-set to the New World. Did it exist in the same way in France and French America? Among Asian Americans? Evocation and memory of the spirit of place does not seem to be present in quite the same way in traditional African American music. Such comparative analysis is a topic for an ethnomusicologist, but for another time.

A Hoosier Mediation

2011-05-20T19:29:00.000-04:00

       Last fall I was invited by the graduate students in folklore and ethnomusicology at Indiana University to give the keynote address at their 4th annual graduate student conference, on March 25, 2011, a conference in which they combine with graduate students in folklore and ethnomusicology from the Ohio State University, to present papers discussing aspects of their current research, usually either completed research based on Master’s theses, or ongoing research that is forming their PhD dissertations. In so doing they are getting professional training in research presentation, while they also have an opportunity to focus their research and get feedback from an audience of their peers and the various professors at the two universities. Indiana University has the largest and oldest folklore doctoral program in North America; with the demise of the folklore doctoral program at the University of Pennsylvania, Indiana's is also clearly the most distinguished. Their ethnomusicology graduate program, one of many distinguished programs in North America, was also one of the earliest, having begun when comparative musicologist George Herzog and anthropologist Alan Merriam joined forces on the faculty there in the early 1950s.
       When I asked why they chose me, I was told that my own research and publications had combined the disciplines of ethnomusicology and folklore for four decades; that in addition to having taught those subjects to graduate students at two universities, I had directed the doctoral program in ethnomusicology at Brown for 25 years and had been elected as a Fellow of the American Folklore Society 13 years ago. I could also have told them that I taught, briefly, at Indiana University’s Folklore Institute in the summer of 1977, just prior to undertaking the documentary research that would form the basis of the Powerhouse for God projects (book, LP recording, and documentary film) although at that time I did not have anything more than a documentation project in mind.
       I could have told them that in 1977 I had the pleasure of a brief meeting with George List, then blind, but still the director of the ethnomusicology program at the Folklore Institute, and heir to the legacy of George Herzog, a student of Erich von Hornbostel, the father of ethnomusicology, and himself the most influential ethnomusicologist in the US between roughly 1930-1950. I could also have told them that I was invited to the home of Richard Dorson, the long-time director of the Folklore Institute. There, Dorson pointed to a line of books above his lengthy mantelpiece—a yard and a half long--written or edited by Dorson himself.
       When I saw it, I was reminded of Thoreau’s sardonic remark that he owned a thousand books in his library, 900 of which he had written himself. That was because his books scarcely sold during his lifetime, and his publishers had sent the remaining copies back to the author. Of course, he is much read today. Dick Dorson was much read then by “professional folklorists,” a term that he insisted in using to distinguish those with the doctorate in folklore (or, I suppose, a reputation among academic folklorists for professional research, as his own doctoral degree was in American studies—the same as mine). Dorson also wrote and edited popular books of folktales for a general audience, lengthening the line of books on his mantelpiece more quickly than if he had limited himself to research monographs. These popular books were always well annotated, to distinguish them from those written and edited by amateurs. Dorson's ambitious plans for the Institute, partly realized, were cut short only a few years later when he died of a heart attack on the tennis court.
        As a booster of graduate education and the professionalization of folklore as a discipline, Dorson had no equal. At the time of his death, strong doctoral programs in folklore could be found at the University of Texas, the University of Pennsylvania, and UCLA as well as at Indiana. Today only the doctoral program at Indiana survives, and folklore as a discipline is much more diffuse than it was in Dorson's era. Folklorists have gone from a concentration in verbal forms such as the folktale, and an emphasis on folklore as text, to a variety of interests and methodologies, with verbal forms, material culture, aesthetics and the ethnography of everyday life among the most popular. An emphasis on folklore as process and performance, rather than as text, unites the academic discipline to some extent.
        Meanwhile, beginning in the 1980s, with fewer and fewer academic jobs available, professional folklorists began entering the public sector and non-profit worlds as arts administrators. Today more than half of the members of the American Folklore Society who hold full-time jobs (that is, excepting students) are employed outside of the academic world. When I joined both the American Folklore Society (AFS) and the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) in the 1970s, there were about half again as many members of the former society as the latter. That percentage stayed roughly the same until about 1990 when the number in AFS began gradually to decline while membership in SEM gradually increased. Doctoral programs in ethnomusicology, based in music departments or schools of music, can be found today in many fine US universities, including Columbia, Harvard, UCLA, Indiana, Illinois, Washington, Ohio State, Wesleyan, Berkeley, and my own university, Brown, where one was started in 1967.
       Today the membership in AFS and SEM is the reverse of what it was about 37 years ago: SEM has about half again as many members as AFS, chiefly academics although an increasing number combine academic and applied work and some applied ethnomusicologists are employed outside the academic world. Nonetheless, folklorists continue to obtain academic jobs at various colleges and universities, in departments as various as history, anthropology, English, sociology, women's, cultural and American studies; whereas in my generation and earlier folklorists were housed chiefly in English departments. In addition, folklorists are enjoying distinguished academic careers, if not building doctoral programs in folklore, at various universities. In some places, folklore has colonized American studies programs; in others, folklore has gained sub-concentrations in traditional disciplines such as English; and in others, such as Western Kentucky and North Carolina, fine graduate programs have continued at the MA level. Of course, the economic downturn that began in 2008 has hurt the academic job market in folklore, ethnomusicology, and other disciplines in the humanities.
        It was good in 2011 to see the folklore and ethnomusicology graduate students at Indiana and Ohio State enjoying each other’s company and appreciating one another’s work. That was not the case at Indiana in 1977; and there was scarcely any ethnomusicology at Ohio State then. I had assumed, back in 1977 when I went to Indiana to teach in their summer session, that because the ethnomusicology doctoral program was housed within the Folklore Institute, that ethnomusicologists and folklorists would have had much to share in the study of music, which at that time was a more important part of folklore studies than it is today. I knew that several students of American folk music were there at the Institute pursuing a doctoral degree in folklore, and I assumed that they would benefit from a context where they could pursue their work in both folklore and ethnomusicology, as I had done in my own graduate studies a decade earlier at the University of Minnesota where I had studied ethnomusicology with Alan Kagan and folklore with Art Geffen and Marty (he never went by Martin) Roth.
        But a happy marriage between folklore and ethnomusicology was not what I found within the Folklore Institute in 1977. The folklore graduate students I spoke with who had wanted to do doctoral work in music had been diverted (and in some cases prevented) from doing so if they did not already have the equivalent of an undergraduate music major, including advanced training in music theory. If they had had it—and none of them did—they would have been welcomed into ethnomusicology courses; without it, they were not only prevented from those courses but also told by Richard Dorson that they did not have the professional qualifications to do research in music. Besides, Dorson distrusted these “folkies” interested in American folk music; to him they appeared too much like amateurs and indeed many of them actually sang and played this music—horror of horrors, as if in one’s heart one could be only either a musician or a scholar but not both. Never mind if they had serious research interests in the music they were singing and playing; in Dorson's view (and List's) they did not have the requisite distance from their subject to attain the necessary objectivity needed for professional research.
        In addition to the oral histories and tragic life stories that I was hearing from my new acquaintances among the graduate students—one of them, Neil Rosenberg, later wrote movingly about his frustrations (“Picking Myself Apart: A Hoosier Memoir,” Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 108 (1995): 277-286)—I heard an opposite point of view from the ethnomusicology graduate students. I recall a meeting with them in which they expressed to me their opinion that this requirement (a strong background in Western music history and theory) for folklorists (and others) studying American folk music (or any other music, for that matter) at the graduate level was both necessary and appropriate; and did I, as someone who had had that background and was teaching both folklore and ethnomusicology at Tufts University then, not agree with them?
        Indeed, I told them, I did not. I told them I thought music could be studied “professionally” from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. I told them I thought there was a distinguished history of literary critics’ studies of lyrics, insights which people like themselves, without an education in literature, probably would not have. I told them I thought there was a growing and fine sociologically-based study of music in the field of what was then called “popular culture studies,” later to become cultural studies. In the next few decades cultural studies, of course, produced many more studies of American popular music than ethnomusicology did. I told them that many folklorists had, in the past, made important scholarly contributions to the study of folk music, without having had the equivalent of an undergraduate degree in music. I asked them if they thought that Albert Lord, or for that matter Francis James Child, had undergone such music training? They had not. Finally, I told them it was arrogant to erect and maintain such barriers, and that they were wrong in thinking that in doing so they were shutting others out. In truth, I said, what they were really doing was shutting themselves out, out of what I saw as a growing interdisciplinary conversation about music that was taking place not only in folklore but also in sociology, popular culture, literary criticism, history, philosophy (aesthetics), and anthropology.
       Ordinarily I would not have been so oppositional as a guest, or as bold and forthcoming as a young, visiting assistant professor. But I felt strongly that this policy, one that I understood was determined by George List (Dorson, who it was said didn't much like music anyway, simply enforced it), not only was hurtful to the folklore students interested in music, and of course to their career hopes; but it would also prevent a lot of good research from being done, and set back for years the study of American folk music. No other educational institution was so well positioned as the Folklore Institute to create a strong curriculum that would enable the most interested scholars, those most seriously committed, to research American folk music and obtain the doctorate with that specialty. (I should add that very few ethnomusicologists were interested in studying American folk music at the time; most were interested in exotic music and wished to travel to far countries.) Besides, things had happened fast to me while I was out there in Bloomington, in May and June of 1977. I could now speak to them from a position of security that was not simply intellectual, for my scholarship and teaching had just been independently validated. I suddenly had a research fellowship and, for as long as I wanted it, a guaranteed academic job. I had learned from the National Endowment for the Humanities that I'd won a year-long fellowship, and Tufts had just let me know that I was among the ten percent of their faculty that year who had been awarded tenure.
        I could have devoted the keynote address to this bit of history and personal drama--the topic was up to me--but because relations among folklore and ethnomusicology graduate students had greatly improved at the Folklore Institute during the past three decades, and this conference was proof of that, it would have been ancient history, sleeping dogs that should not be stirred, relevant only to those asking why it was that two generations of folklorists (my generation and the next) had not done as much research in United States folk music as one might have hoped, given the interest in the subject among the general public in the last half of the 20th century; or why it was that folklorists in the United States were so far behind their European counterparts in the study of their own folk music. And so I left these subjects, even though they have been on my mind for many years, for another time and place.
        But instead of exploring another facet of my argument concerning music and sustainability--authenticity--I decided to relate my interests in music and sustainability to the conference theme, which was “mediation,” broadly considered. One kind of media-ation relates to the information revolution and how people all over the world are increasingly surrounded by media representations of “the real thing,” or simulacra as Baudrillard put it. Besides, the folklorist and the ethnomusicologist are mediators in many ways. We mediate between our academic cultures and their people, on the one hand, and our subject cultures and their people when we do fieldwork. So, for example, I wrote an essay about mediation back in the early 1980s, discussing the navigation of roles, stances, and identities that the researcher (myself) assumes in doing fieldwork with religious groups, particularly when these groups were absolutist in their beliefs about the world. In my world, academics are relativists who “bracket” or suspend both belief and disbelief about such things as, for instance, whether God exists and whether one religious doctrine is true and another is false, while doing their research. Meanwhile we concentrate on ethnographic work: that is, trying to document and report accurately what it is that the people they are studying believe, the "native's point of view" as Malinowski famously put it nearly a hundred years ago. I added that it was ironic that one felt forced into this kind of objectivity when one does this kind of research without being a cultural insider or believer in the religious doctrine under study. On the other hand, many ethnomusicologists believe that participant-observation is usually a better path toward understanding than mere observation itself; except in cases like this where participation may be impossible. ("Role, Stance, and Identity in Fieldwork Among Folk Baptists and Pentecostals in the United States." American Music, Vol. 3 [1985]: 16-24.)
        I chose to speak about a different kind of mediation: a musical instrument as a mediator, in three different ways; and the instrument I chose was one of several which I have played for more than thirty years: the banjo. I spoke about the banjo as a social and cultural mediator; as a taxonomic mediator; and as a performance mediator in terms of its role in the old-time string band. Particularly in its role in the old-time string band, the banjo encourages the kind of creative improvisation that both sustains the the people who make music (makes it continually challenging and interesting) and also in so doing sustains (conserves) the music, gives it a future as well as a present.
        As a taxonomic mediator, the banjo troubles the most fundamental boundary level in the famous Sachs-Hornbostel musical instrument classification, between membranophone (the banjo’s skin head is a membrane and a sound producer) and chordophone (sound produced from vibrating strings). In terms of its physical construction it is both a membranophone and a chordophone. In one sense it is a mediator between the two classes; in another sense it is unclassifiable.
        As a sociocultural mediator, the banjo was brought to the New World by Africans. In the 19th century it was played by African-Americans and by the European-Americans who learned it from them. The banjo was crucial in the ongoing Black-white musical interchange, one that already, prior to the Civil War, had resulted in the first distinctively American music. This was long before ragtime and jazz, the musical genres that are usually (and incorrectly) pointed to in that regard. In this fusion the banjo and fiddle (an instrument that many Black Americans learned, as they furnished much of the dance music in the Colonies and the new Republic) were key. They altered the 19th century American musical soundscape, and set it in a direction—swing, flow, drive, pulse, participatory discrepancies, whatever one wants to call this rhythmic feel—that would integrate itself into popular dance music of all kinds in the 20th century. As Alan Jabbour has persuasively argued, Black ways of bowing the fiddle “spoke” syncopation and became a sine qua non of dance fiddling in the South. The same could be said of the banjo, whose drone string when played in the stroke or minstrel style gave the music an offbeat emphasis and a new rhythmic feel: swing.
    To illustrate the Black-white musical interchange I showed some of the paintings that William Sidney Mount rendered from the 1830s through the 1860s. Mount was the first and one of the few 19th century artists in the United States to paint vernacular musicians accurately and frequently. Usually regarded as a mere "genre painter," he was nevertheless a serious and fine artist whose work is unusually valuable to the music historian. The only other painter of comparable--actually greater--stature who painted fiddlers and banjo players was Eastman Johnson, and he was both a generation later and not as realistic or as detailed in his representations of instruments, playing postures, and the like. I myself became aware of the Mount paintings and sketches in the 1960s while a graduate student, and I reproduced one in my doctoral dissertation (1971) and my book that came of it (Early Downhome Blues [University of Illinois Press, 1977]). The Mount painting of a Black banjo player ("The Banjo Player," [1856]) has graced museum greeting cards and is well known to anyone with an interest in the history of the banjo; but here just below is one, "Dance of the Haymakers" (1845), that shows a young Black lad playing percussion and patting his foot (outside the barn) in a rhythm that very likely "swings" and encourages the white fiddler playing the tune, and the two young men dancing. Up in the loft a little white girl and her black companion (standing), possibly a "nurse," look on:

Of course, as would be appropriate at that time and place, he is outside the barn, not quite a part of the instrumental ensemble socially; but he is part of it musically. Mount painted music in his community on Long Island, New York. He was, himself, a fiddler and a tune collector and transcriber as well as a painter. He invented a cornerless fiddle that he called "The Cradle of Harmony," but he made his living as a painter, chiefly from portraits that were commissioned by patrons who could afford them. Among his genre paintings were about a dozen non-commissioned canvases depicting fiddlers, banjo players, and dance music. Most found buyers. His brother Robert was a fiddler and dancing master who traveled and instructed dance classes in the South.
       While it is appropriate to give any artist license to paint from an inner vision, and not to take quite literally the representations that they make, however realistic they seem, in the case of Mount's music paintings there seems little reason not to take them as accurate renderings of the music in his community, though to be sure they are overlaid with sentimentality. It is hard to believe, for instance, that the little dog in the foreground would not be tearing into the carcass of the bird on the plate at the edge of the barn. But the musicians seem to have been real. In fact, the names of most of the musicians depicted in Mount's paintings are coming to light. They were local musicians that Mount saw and heard frequently. Some, like the fiddler depicted in Mount's painting "Just in Tune," he knew intimately: the model was his brother Robert. I told the audience that my musicologist colleague Chris Smith has been researching this and other aspects of Mount's work and is preparing a book discussing Mount and the evidence that these paintings and sketches provide for this musical interchange, and its sociocultural implications; and that it will surely be an eye-opening work of scholarship. Interestingly, because the Mount paintings of Black and white fiddlers and banjo players have been familiar to me for so many years, I had neglected to anticipate that they might be unfamiliar to this conference audience, even though many were doing research in American music. Indeed, they were unfamiliar; but the group of graduate students and professors were quite taken with them. If that is any indication of the potential audience for Chris Smith’s book, it will be even more appealing and important.
        Finally, I spoke about the banjo as a mediating instrument in the performance of old-time string band music, and I took up a subject that I’ve been fussing with for many years: how an old-time string band musician (in this case, a banjo player) learns to play a tune by ear as it’s being played, over and over again, a tune that he or she has never heard before. I am particularly interested in how the tune appears in the mind and in the fingers, how it is presented to the musician’s consciousness successively, each time it flies by, so to speak. To use a technical term, this is a phenomenological inquiry. As I’ve been trying to write an essay on this subject (and trying to use evidence not only from introspection based on my own playing, but also from others’ testimony as how the tunes appear to their consciousness—and not everyone reports this to be the same) for a number of years, I’m going to have to leave it at that, here.
        I concluded the keynote address on the banjo as a mediator by emphasizing the creative aspects of learning to “set” a tune (either on banjo or fiddle) by ear, a tune that one has not heard before, in real time; and I tried to indicate that the pleasure and the craft satisfaction found in doing it well (or reasonably so) is sufficient to make this way of making music fill a large part one’s musical life, sustaining both oneself as a musician and in the process sustaining a musical tradition. It is not an easy skill to learn, by the way; it may take several years, and it is particularly difficult on the banjo, because it is not possible to render the fiddler’s melody exactly as the fiddler plays it, at least not without sacrificing the rhythmic drive and swing that is the making of this old Southern sound; and so the banjo player must create a melodic setting that is complementary to that of the fiddle. These skills are not the same as those that improvising jazz musicians develop, by the way, although they are related; but that is yet another story which must be left for another time.
        After this keynote the audience engaged me in conversation about it for more than an hour. They were chiefly interested in the Mount paintings and what they might mean. I was happy to discuss that, and reminded them of Chris Smith's forthcoming book. I tried to steer the conversation back to music and sustainability when I could, emphasizing the Black-white interchange as an instance of the ways innovation gives life and sustains music while transforming sound and enhancing its bodily experience. We adjourned to a delicious and appropriate pot-luck dinner at folklorist and professor John McDowell's home in Bloomington, where the conversation continued for a few more hours before, exhausted from my flight from Providence that morning and my endeavors that afternoon, I left the gathering for the motel and a sound sleep.

The Curry Lecture: Applied Ethnomusicology

2011-04-24T13:45:00.006-04:00

Having just returned from a stimulating trip to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and now finished with the last of my guest lectures this semester on music and sustainability, I’d like to catch the blog up on them here, beginning with the Curry Lecture which I delivered at the University of Michigan last March 18. Soon I will post about my talk at Indiana University a week later, and then about the ones at Chapel Hill. The Ethel V. Curry Distinguished Lecture in Musicology is an endowed lecture series created for the University of Michigan by H. Robert Reynolds in honor of his mother. Now retired and living in California, he was for many years a professor in the School of Music at the University of Michigan; he returned to Ann Arbor for this lecture. I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Reynolds at the lecture and thanking him as we spoke for some minutes before the lecture.

My lecture had been advertised at http://www.music.umich.edu/departments/musicology/lectures.htm as follows, in the generic descriptive paragraph that I gave them last fall when I wasn’t yet sure which aspect of the project I would emphasize: “While sustainability is in vogue today, musical and cultural sustainability have yet to be fully theorized. If ethnomusicology is the study of people making music, and applied ethnomusicology is the application of that study in the public interest, Professor Jeff Todd Titon asks how cultural policy regarding music may be informed by the most powerful contemporary discourses in sustainability, those coming from ecology and economics.” The advertisement concludes with a link to this blog.

As usual with descriptions like this given well in advance, they represent the project as it then exists; predictably, it turned out that during my fall presentations at the conferences of the Society for Ethnomusicology and the American Folklore Society I continued exploring the sustainability discourses in ecology and economics, seeking complementarity between them in the concept of “Nature’s economy.” I’ve already written about those presentations on this blog, and also offered the papers themselves. In my lecture at the University of Texas I concentrated on the cultural policy aspects of the project, working with (and against) David Throsby's ideas concerning the economics of cultural policy. And so in the Curry Lecture I turned to a different aspect of the project, in response to requests from professors and students there who wanted to know more about applied ethnomusicology. That is, in addition to offering an overview of the project, I spent the first third of the talk on a definition and explanation of applied ethnomusicology, along with some illustrations. For when an ethnomusicologist gets involved with a project like this, which involves theorizing towards a public policy implementation, it falls under the heading of applied ethnomusicology. And so that will be the subject of this blog entry, expanded somewhat from what I said in Ann Arbor.

In 1992, when I was editor of Ethnomusicology, the Journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology, I solicited articles for a special issue on applied ethnomusicology. At that time there was no single word for this field: it was either called public sector ethnomusicology (after public sector folklore), or applied ethnomusicology (after applied anthropology). Other terms in use were practice ethnomusicology, action ethnomusicology, and active ethnomusicology. In recognition that the name had not yet been settled, I called the special issue “ethnomusicology in the public interest,” a working definition of applied ethnomusicology that appealed to me because it suggested a recognition of civic responsibility in all that we are about, a view that our work ought to engage with public discourse beyond university walls. “This work,” I wrote, “involves and empowers music-makers and music-cultures in collaborative projects that present, represent, and affect the cultural flow of music throughout the world” (“Music, the Public Interest, and the Practice of Ethnomusicology,” Ethnomusicology, Vol. 36, no. 3 [1992], p. 315).

In my introductory essay for that special issue, I emphasized the differences between practice and theory, and between the ivory tower of the university and the world of practice outside of it, far more than I do today, and more than I did in 2003 at the first conference devoted to applied ethnomusicology, which was held at Brown and organized by two of our doctoral candidates, Erica Haskell and Maureen Loughran (see "Invested in Community" at: http://dl.lib.brown.edu/invested_in_community/index.html). But in the period from 1950-1990 there was a good deal of opposition, chiefly among senior ethnomusicologists (I was not quite so senior at the time), to applied ethnomusicology. Some agreed with Alan Merriam that ethnomusicology ought to be a pure science, not an applied one; for in the early 1950s the founders of the Society for Ethnomusicology had, after all, rejected overtures from the International Folk Music Council to ally their work with theirs, on account of a perceived bias at the IFMC towards “salvage” work—a romantic preoccupation with dead and dying musics and musical cultures. According to the founders, ethnomusicologists were meant to study all music as objectively and scientifically as possible; romantic bias had no place in the discipline. Merriam had, also, recently and publicly ridiculed applied ethnomusicology in K-12 education as “sandbox ethnomusicology,” taking a swipe at the direction Society for Ethnomusicology co-founder David McAllester had gone since about 1970. Other prominent ethnomusicologists put it more mildly: applied ethnomusicology surely was a good thing for society, but was the practice of music in the public interest really ethnomusicology?

In this new millennium resistance to applied ethnomusicology has abated. Within the Society, a special interest group (committee) on applied ethnomusicology was founded, by myself and some others, in 1997; and in 2002 some of the members of that group turned it into a “section,” a more permanent designation. Today the section, of which I am currently a co-chair, has more than 100 members and is the largest section in the Society. Most ethnomusicologists, today, have adopted a live and let live attitude; applied ethnomusicology is fine for those who want to do it, and not required for those ethnomusicologists who do not.

Some veteran applied ethnomusicologists, though, carry forward habitual animosities toward academics; and these are not helpful, if they ever were. They think of applied ethnomusicology as an "alternative career," thereby immediately marginalizing themselves and erecting barriers between academic and applied ethnomusicology. One can just as easily imagine the academic career as an alternative to a career in the public sphere; indeed, some non-academics think of universities as ivory towers that are out of touch with the mainstream. But the fact is that many ethnomusicologists employed by colleges and universities do applied work, while many applied workers employed outside of universities do academic research.

In the Curry Lecture, I defined applied ethnomusicology as the process of putting ethnomusicological research to practical use. It is not the same as putting music to use; many people put music to use without the benefit of ethnomusicological research. Nonetheless, this definition that I favor now is, like my earlier notion of ethnomusicology in the public interest, more inclusive than some other current definitions, emanating particularly from my European colleagues, which ally applied ethnomusicology to a desire to intervene with music on behalf of peace and social justice. While it’s true that many applied ethnomusicologists do this work for that reason, one with which my own history with activism aligns, this is too narrow a definition to accommodate much that goes on in this field, such as medical ethnomusicology, which includes music therapy as well as education for HIV/AIDS. Other examples of applied ethnomusicology include public programming involving documentation and presentation of under-represented music at museums and festivals; participatory action research, involving partnerships with community scholars to work toward mutual community music goals such as encouraging conditions under which music will flourish; music, peace studies, and conflict resolution, particularly with regard to ethnic rivalries in the Balkans and Middle East; education, enabling multicultural initiatives such as a diversity of music in the curriculum; and cultural policy regarding music, including sustainability initiatives.

None of these examples is out of harmony with pluralism and social justice goals and most are, in fact, very much in the same spirit; and yet one can imagine ethnomusicological research put to use in the service of other ideologies. For example, some Christian missionaries do engage in what they call applied ethnomusicology, the application of ethnomusicological knowledge to fieldwork and musical partnerships with various groups, with conversion and education a principal goal. One group, led by Brian Schrag, who received his PhD in ethnomusicology from UCLA, has worked out a methodology and has presented examples of their work in Africa at the annual conferences of the Society for Ethnomusicology. Brian and his group do seek social justice for the Africans they work with, but within an explicit Christian framework. Well, why not? Still, this is different from the work of ethnomusicologist Rabbi Jeffrey Summit with a group of Ugandan Jews. Rabbi Summit’s goal is not conversion; it is musical and cultural conservation. These Africans are already Jewish. My own work with various religious musical cultures (all Christian) is the same: the goals have been documentation and conservation, as well as interpretation.

One could say that the musical relativism on which ethnomusicology was founded (in response to the perceived absolutism of older musicologists whose subject was the tradition of Western art music aka classical music, and who considered it to be the best, the most rewarding, most stimulating, most complex, most civilizing musical achievement of humankind) should not, to be consistent in principle, exclude applied ethnomusicologies with varying ideological agendas. On the other hand, one might argue that there is a difference between musical relativism and ideological relativism.

It is an old argument. Should the definition include, for example, ethnomusicological research put to use in torturing political prisoners? It so happens that the United States bombards Muslim “detainees” with loud music, in their efforts to break their resistance and obtain information. Evidently hip-hop is especially loathed, especially Eminem. The Society for Ethnomusicology’s Executive Board, on the recommendation from the Society’s Ethics Committee, put out a statement on the SEM website publicly condemning the use of music for torture. (Go to: http://webdb.iu.edu/sem/scripts/aboutus/aboutsem/positionstatements/position_statement_torture.cfm)

It so happens that I was the one who brought the matter before the Ethics Committee in the first place, and I found nothing but strong support for my position all the way through to the publication of the statement—the first time that SEM has taken such a public political stand, be it said. But can I find an ethical principle that will exclude this appalling use of ethnomusicological research (I don’t know that any ethnomusicologists were directly involved in the government’s decision to use hip-hop to torture political prisoners, of course; my guess is that they consulted the literature of music psychology primarily) and not exclude ideologies that embrace social justice? This is more than a technical question. For the moment applied ethnomusicology can afford, in my view, to be inclusive and expansive. I can imagine a time when it may not be so easy for me to take this view.

Having worked through a definition of applied ethnomusicology, though not with all of this background, I went on to give examples of it, such as the ones above, and to speak at length about my longitudinal study and partnership with the Old Regular Baptists, in southeastern Kentucky, who were and are keen to conserve their traditional sound, embodied in their lined-out hymnody. Neither proselytizing nor conversion was at stake here; it was a matter of improving the musical and cultural conditions under which this group could conserve their musical tradition, the oldest continuous English-language sacred song tradition in the United States. This is, for example, the way that the Massachusetts Bay Puritans sang; the first book published in Colonial America was theirs, the Bay Psalm Book. I have written extensively about this work elsewhere, but the effects of the project were summarized by Elwood Cornett, the moderator (elected head) of the Indian Bottom Association of Old Regular Baptists, in the program "Radio-Gram: Religion" thus: http://www.appalshop.org/wmmt/node?page=23&prevnext=7

In the Curry Lecture I also discussed the dichotomy between “pure” and “applied” with ethnomusicology in mind. My view is that they are two sides of the same coin, and that the distinction is not helpful. The pure versus applied distinction is borrowed from the natural sciences, where “pure” science means research aimed primarily at offering analysis, explanation, and understanding and at increasing knowledge about the natural world. So-called “applied” science means research aimed primarily at finding practical uses for pure research in order to meet human goals. In other words, applied science involves applying theoretical knowledge gained in pure research to make interventions in the natural world that meet human needs and desires.

The classic distinction is often made between the pure science of mathematics and the applied science of engineering. How might this distinction work in the discipline of ethnomusicology? Not very well, I believe. For not only are the pure and applied interdependent, as are the theoretical and practical; but academic and public ethnomusicology are interconnected as well. Most pure ethnomusicologists do applied work. We think, perhaps, of the pure ethnomusicologist in the university doing research. But even the most six-ply, steel-belted, fully tenured ethnomusicologists do applied work when they teach, and when they do fieldwork. They may also theorize applied ethnomusicology from within the academic world, as I am doing now. And they may engage in applied projects from their secure base in the university.

At the same time, applied ethnomusicologists, even when working outside the universities, not only employ ethnomusicology theory but advance our knowledge of people making music through the practice of ethnomusicology. In doing fieldwork aimed at presenting music in various settings such as artists in the schools, museums, concerts, and ethnic festivals, they identify, document, and interpret the music they are becoming acquainted with and add to the storehouse of pure ethnomusicological knowledge. The same could be said about ethnomusicologists involved in medical ethnomusicology, for example, insofar as they contribute to our knowledge about the physiology and psychology of music; and about ethnomusicologists doing participatory action research, insofar as they learn ethnographic information which contributes to our knowledge of particular music cultures. And so forth, but you get the drift: applied contributes to pure, pure to applied, and the categories spin and merge in what is called practice theory, or theory grounded in practice: the finest kind of each.

For the rest of the Curry Lecture, I gave the assembled group—perhaps 200 of them—an overview of the music and sustainability project. I’ve worked out some Keynote (the Apple version of Microsoft’s Powerpoint) slides that help me present it, and I found them useful at the University of Texas and again just recently at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. After the lecture, there was a question-answer session for about an hour, and then we broke up. I went to supper with a group of professors, ethnomusicologists and musicologists, and we talked well into the night, past 11 p.m. One of the wonderful things about giving these invited lectures this semester has been the chance to listen to questions and critique, some of which carry on in email, as I try to work these ideas into a book manuscript. At the same time, I hope that something I say at these talks will affect each of the listeners, for I want to leave them with an idea or two that may prove useful and helpful in their own work, for ultimately it is not my work or theirs but it is our work after all.

Sound Sacralizes Space

2011-04-18T22:41:00.006-04:00

Let us once again enlarge the discussion from music to sound, a move toward the soundscape that I have been led to make over and over again. As Theodore Roethke wrote, "I learn by going where I have to go." By now I hope the lesson is learned. At any rate, shifting attention from music to sound has been very helpful to me in thinking about the role of music--and sound--in sustaining life on planet Earth.

Sound sacralizes space through co-presence. That is, one senses the presence of something greater than oneself through sound. It is not only sound that does this; touch will do it as well. But sound is present from a distance and can be present virtually whereas touch cannot be.

Space, or place, may become sacralized visually as well as aurally. One experiences the sublime in the presence of Nature, the natural world, visually and aurally. When you close your eyes, the visual world disappears while the aural world remains. Open your eyes and the visual world reappears as it was. Sound, on the other hand, comes and goes. It is ephemeral. Its sudden appearance and disappearance does not depend on opening and closing one's ears; it is there and then not there. Sound's sacralization of space is sudden, dramatic.

Secular sounds sacralize place, memorialize people. The names of fiddle tunes--"The Brushy Fork of John's Creek" (memorializing the last battle in Pike Co., Kentucky, during the Civil War); "Bill Brown" (memorializing a peddler who was murdered); "They Swung John Brown from a Sour Apple Tree"--these are among tunes I play, and they invoke co-presence. Often an old-time string band fiddler will say the name of the person from whom he or she learned the tune, just before or after playing it, invoking the co-presence of the source musician.

Co-presence, a concept developed by the sociologist Shanyang Zhao, refers to "a sense of being with others," both physically (face-to-face) and virtually. The concept has been useful in exploring ways in which people feel connected on the Internet even though they are not physically present to one another. Here I want to extend co-presence to the sense that when sound sacralizes space one feels in the presence of something greater than oneself. There is a kind of virtuality in that the "greater than oneself" is felt but the presence does not take on a particular physical embodiment.

Back in 1971 the blues singer Leonard "Baby Doo" Caston reminisced to me about working as a sharecropper when he was a teenager. Out chopping (weeding) corn, he used to sing out a field holler, "the old cornfield blues without an instrument," and he remarked that the sound would carry far out there in the country soundscape. "Lazy" Bill Lucas, blues singer and pianist, was there too, and he responded that the woods were like an echo chamber, that those field hollers would carry for miles and that others would hear them and answer them with their own field hollers. Co-presence. The holler organizes the fields and woods aurally much as Wallace Stevens's jar organized the Tennessee wilderness visually ("Anecdote of the Jar" is the Stevens poem I'm referring to here.) In those days I was thinking about field hollers as a musical genre and precursor of the blues, but Baby Doo and Lazy Bill were trying to tell me about something else: the field holler as soundscape, sound sacralizing space. You can hear what they say and then hear Baby Doo sing a field holler on the CD set accompanying the book Worlds of Music.

Soundscape, a concept developed by R. Murray Schafer (his book, The Tuning of the World [1977] is definitive), refers to the acoustic environment. It is a back-formation from the word landscape. His work on soundscape included exercises for paying attention to sound (what he termed "ear-cleaning"). His work arose in the context of noise pollution; he was a historian of sound, and a social engineer interested in acoustic design in the service of more healthful soundscapes. In Schafer's view, soundscapes contained keynotes (background sounds, such as wind, insects, birds), signals (foreground sounds that are present to consciousness), and soundmarks (sounds unique to particular communities, which need protection). Endangered musical cultures possess soundmarks.

Schafer also coined the term schizophonia, referring to a feeling of unease with the doubleness of sound when the sound is separated from the source of its original production, as when one listens to a recording of a live performance. Schizophonia (a back-formation from schizophrenia) is also an instance of co-presence, and is experienced today without unease or confusion by many; but for Schafer it was a modern disease. It need not be; it also characterizes community on the Internet; that is, the kind of co-presence one feels when socially networked with others on listservs and other kinds of Internet communities, such as Facebook.

A realist, Schafer was not so much interested in sound as socially constructed, or the soundscapes of memory, as I am. Much of my ethnographic research in music has been research in sound. My Powerhouse for God project (documentary LP, 1983; book, 1988; documentary film, 1989 which is stream-able free on folkstreams.net) started with music but quickly moved to sound: the book's subtitle is "speech, chant, and song in an Appalachian Baptist church." Music was one thing, knowable; but the holy whine of the preacher's voice and the sung prayer was mysterious, as well it should have been, the peculiar sound marking (in the churchmembers' worldview) the presence of the divine and thereby sacralizing the sanctuary space of the church. That presence is a co-presence, not corporeal. The project I did with Rev. C.L. Franklin focused on his sung sermons ("whooping," as it is called in the Black churches), not on the magnificent gospel music, spirituals, or lined-out hymnody in the church--which, after all, was where his daughter Aretha made her bones, so it must have been wonderful--and it was. But I was drawn even more to the sound of the preaching, the moments when speech turned to chant and sound sacralized space and place.

It was in the 1990s when I visited the Old Regular Baptists in southeastern Kentucky that I encountered people who spoke explicitly of sound transforming and sacralizing space, whether singing in the coal mine or the sound of the singing coming down from the mountains or echoing outside the churches on a Sunday morning, heard by the children playing up and down the creek beds. Their words about sound may be heard on the first of the two CDs that Smithsonian Folkways released from my field tape recordings: Songs of the Old Regular Baptists. To close out the CD we chose to present excerpts from some of their statements about the singing, and many mentioned the sound and its "drawing power." Elwood Cornett, the moderator (head) of the Indian Bottom Association of Old Regular Baptists, said: "When I came into this life there was that sound. I hope that when I leave here, that I leave the same sound that I found when I came here." The Old Regular Baptists weren't thinking about their music as music; they were talking about the power of its sound to open a communication channel in the co-presence of the divine.

An acoustic ecology devoted to music and its role in sustaining life on planet Earth would do well to understand, before engaging in social engineering and managing soundscapes, how sound sacralizes space and place.

Breaking Up Winter 2011

2011-03-20T10:27:00.005-04:00

We are almost to the first day of spring. In a musical celebration of the end of winter, the Nashville Old Time String Band Association has hosted a “Breakin’ Up Winter” event for the past sixteen years, at Cedars of Lebanon State Park, near Nashville, Tennessee. (The title also refers to a well-known old-time fiddle tune, "Breakin' Up Christmas.") I’ve gone to three of these events, including the 2011 event only a few weeks ago. At Breakin' Up Winter, a group of mostly amateur musicians who love the fiddle, banjo, and guitar music played in the nineteenth and early twentieth century upper South, the so-called “old time music,” a community listening and dance music which preceded bluegrass, and which bluegrass updates and re-presents, gathers for four days at the Park, chiefly to play music together informally in small groups, or “jams.” Other stringed instruments are played in some jams, particularly the string bass and mandolin. It's an oral tradition that we've learned by ear and we know it by heart. Although some can read musical notation, it's not really a part of this tradition and even though tune books exist--I have compiled one myself--they are used for reference only. Similar jam-oriented events take place at "festivals" of old-time music in the upper South every week during the summer. Thousands of musicians attend these.

This is a participatory music, not a music designed for audiences. The musicians play with, and for, each other. In an old-time jam, some of the musicians may never have played with one another before. The music consists chiefly of “fiddle tunes” which all play together. The fiddles play the melody, and if there's more than one fiddler each usually will have their own setting and play the melody slightly differently, setting up a sound that's sometimes a bit out of phase. The banjo players (some groups prefer no more than one banjo player) play a version of the melody, somewhat simplified but also slightly contrapuntal, partly improvised in response to the fiddle melody. The guitar accompanies on the beat with bass notes and harmonizes with light, chordal strums; if a mandolin is present, the player may chord along in the background in rhythm or play the fiddler’s melody or alternate between the two. The bass usually plays on the roots and fifths of the chords that harmonize the tune, sometimes playing passing notes ("bass runs"). Unlike bluegrass, in which each instrumentalist takes turns playing “solos” (as in jazz) with the rest accompanying, in old-time the musicians continue to play the tune over and over, on a more or less equal footing (although the guitarist really does have an accompanying role—and yet the rhythmic anchor that the guitar (and if present, the bass) provides enables everyone to feel, and play, better). Jams may be as small as two people or as large as thirty, but the usual preferred size is between three and eight.

Every tune is led by one or more musicians who is capable of playing the tune well, or reasonably so. The other musicians may also have played the tune before, but their knowledge of the tune will vary from those who have never heard it, through those who have played it a few times long ago, to those who need only to be reminded of it to play it well again. But a good old-time musician plays by ear and has developed the ability to learn (or re-learn) a tune on the fly (albeit usually a simplified version of the tune). Banjo players in particular must have this ability, because each fiddler’s setting (melodic version) of a tune is apt to be a little different, and those differences make all the difference. A good banjo player is sensitive to a fiddler’s particular setting, adapts to it, and interacts melodically with it--all by ear, while catching the tune on the fly. Just as it can take many years to learn to be a good old-time fiddler, it can take years to develop the ability to play the banjo passably well in this way.

Old-time musicians seek the “musical high” which a good jam can provide, a feeling that is at once intense and satisfying, full and creative and relaxing. At events such as “Breakin’ Up Winter” most of the music takes place in informal jams, out in the Park, inside community buildings, inside cabins, and on porches, all day and much of the night. Everyone eats together in a mess hall. Also, each day the event provides a few formal jams led by experienced musicians, as well as teaching workshops in which these musicians teach repertoire by ear. Often there is a dance or two, sometimes there are performances by guests who have been invited to teach and lead jams and workshops, and occasionally, as in this event, visitors also give lectures on their involvement with old-time music, which may include stories of encounters with older musicians, documentary recordings which they have produced, and so forth.

I was invited to Breakin’ Up Winter back in 2008 to do all of the above, and again earlier this month, to lead a jam, teach a workshop, and give a lecture. My lecture took up the relation between musical sustainability and old-time music communities such as this one, which involve themselves in music that is largely participatory and operates with exchanges that are primarily gift exchanges (although there are commodity exchanges, and a minority of the music is presentational for an audience).

This is a subject that I’ve thought about for many years—the musical community which is largely participatory and operates through gift exchanges, and the social and political implications of this sharing kind of community, rather than one that is based on individual property and ownership, for the future of the human community in general. I can recall discussing it with other musicians as far back as the 1960s. I don’t want to claim originality here, but I will affirm my persistence.

Nor do I wish to suggest that the old-time musical community embodies an ideal based entirely on equal participation, gifting, and sharing. Particularly when it comes to musical instruments, many old-time musicians are conspicuous consumers. Commodity fetishism describes the fascination that many collectors have with musical instruments, which they buy, admire, collect, trade, sell, and play. A collecting impulse also extends to recordings of old-time tunes. A small number of recordings on CD and the Internet are available for sale, and a few record companies specialize in this; but it is a niche market and no one grows wealthy from it. A small number of old-time musicians supplement their income playing for dances, and for audiences, but there are very few touring groups—and when these play for audiences, they do not jam, but rather they sing songs and play an occasional instrumental piece in a virtuoso style, altering the music to please an audience that expects to be entertained. Few audiences are entertained by old-time jams; the jam is participatory. A bumper sticker reads, “Old time music: better than it sounds.” This aphorism means it is better played than heard.

It is also true that members of the old-time music community have different ideas about inclusiveness. Some are willing to play with musicians who are not as skilled as they, even though it is more enjoyable to play with those who are at about the same skill level, and even more so with musicians who are even better. They understand that once they were not so skilled and they believe it is important to share with others and bring more people into the community; some teach, as I have done for nearly thirty years, without charging for lessons. (Most teachers do charge, however. It’s not that I’m a purist; for twenty-five years I’ve taught a weekly class in old-time music at Brown which is free and open to the community, and I don’t get paid by my university or anyone else for doing so. It costs me only my time—a couple of hours each week—and I’m happy to donate it.) Yet other old-time musicians, particularly among the most skilled, prefer to play with those of their own level, and try to avoid jams with less skilled musicians; for the better the skills of the musicians, the more complex and interesting and pleasurable is the playing experience.

And yet despite consumerism, commodification, and exclusivity in some aspects of old-time string band music, it is marked chiefly by sharing and gift exchanges, of tunes and in jams. The differences between commodity exchanges and gift exchanges are many, because gifts generally incur various obligations that commodities do not entail due to the legal contract involved in buying and owning a commodity, which makes the commodity exchange impersonal. Gift obligations include, among other things, not hoarding the gift, passing the gifts along (gifts circulate), giving back, and also not selling the gift and changing it to a commodity. Gifts engender reciprocal relationships, obligations among giver and receiver, that commodity exchanges do not. Givers and receivers are responsible to one another, and to the gift—and this forms the basis for community relationships of mutuality and trust. Participatory music like old-time music involves a great deal of gifting—passing along tunes, playing with others, learning from others, sharing, and coming together for events such as Breakin’ Up Winter to do all of this. Of course, it can be and more usually is done with musical friends in their homes and yours, nearby. This is the kind of community music-making, amateur music for the love of it, that is most sustainable. It is not limited to old-time string band music, needless to say; many kinds of amateur music are participatory and the majority of exchanges are gifts, beginning with music in the family and neighborhood.

It is easy to romanticize old-time music, and to imagine that the jam at its center is an ancient practice reflecting communal relationships in a preindustrial world. Evidence suggests that this is not so, and that the jam is a product of the folk music revival of the mid-20th century, and that it arose both in bluegrass and old-time music more or less simultaneously. To be sure, old-time musicians got together to play earlier than this, in families and communities; yet the jam as a social institution does not seem more than about sixty years old.

Finally, I want to emphasize once more that among some members of the old-time music revival, the ways in which the old-time jam models social relationships is a topic of conversation that has been going on for some decades. I remember conversations about this that I had with my musician friend Cameron Nickels, going back to the late 1960s when we were both in graduate school at the University of Minnesota. Cameron went on to a career as a professor of English at James Madison University. His research specialty was American humor, and he wrote a couple of books about it—one on New England humor, and a recent book on humor in the Civil War. (Yes, there was a good deal of it.) He retired a few years ago, and from time to time we still discuss this subject, usually vie email. And yet it has not been much written about. I addressed it directly in the Introduction to my book, Old-Time Kentucky Fiddle Tunes (University Press of Kentucky, 2001). Tom Turino, like me an old-time string band musician, has written about it in his book. Music and Social Life (University of Chicago Press, 2008). I view it as a topic, theme, and piece of the puzzle in working out issues involving music and sustainability, and an example of sustainability thinking before it was given the name “sustainability.”

Systems and sustainability at the EPA

2011-02-26T21:25:00.015-05:00

The federal Environmental Protection Agency “is undertaking what some call a ‘seismic shift in the way it works: making ‘sustainability’ its central goal,” said Bruce Gellerman on this morning’s public radio broadcast of Living on Earth. Jeff Young interviewed the new head of the EPA, Paul Anastas, who explained that instead of targeting for specific interventions, he “wants his scientists to think more broadly about systems and sustainability.” Anastas explained using climate change as an example: “Climate is inextricably linked to energy, energy inextricably linked to water, water to agriculture, agriculture to health, and we could go on and on. If we start saying that the entirety of our approach to sustainability is simply to reduce our carbon footprint or to look at any one aspect, then we will not be getting the power and potential of the synergies of looking from a systems approach.”

Anastas’ adoption of the systems approach indeed represents that shift from conservation thinking, in which particular problems such as endangered species are addressed by specific interventions, to ecological thinking, in which the principle of interconnectedness guides policy makers to look at the consequences of specific interventions in the context of the interdependence of the whole system or ecosystem. This is precisely the shift in thinking that I have been proposing for cultural interventions, based on the principle of interconnectedness, one of the four principles I’ve been speaking and writing about. I explain it most thoroughly in my essay, "Music and Sustainability: An Ecological Viewpoint," in The World of Music, Vol. 51, No. 1 (2009), pp. 119-138.

This kind of thinking underlies my proposals to feed the cultural soil, so to speak, rather than the particular arts or genres; in other words, to concentrate efforts in musical and cultural sustainability on improving the conditions that give a life to traditional music and expressive culture, rather than simply targeting endangered musical cultures for support, as UNESCO (the major institution involved in cultural sustainability throughout the world) has been doing in its efforts to safeguard intangible cultural heritage. I would hope that the same kind of shift in strategy that the new EPA head is espousing would translate to the institutions that are making cultural policy—not only UNESCO, but national agencies as well, such as arts councils, museums, historical societies, and traffickers in cultural and musical heritage.

But I’d add a word of caution. This kind of holistic thinking, which Anastas is adopting at the EPA, envisions a paradigmatic environmental system, one that claims that large ecosystems move through a succession of stages towards a balanced state in dynamic equilibrium. The climax forest concept is the usual example. But some contemporary ecologists have discarded this model of a balance of Nature in favor of one based in evolutionary biology, with blind chance and mutation as the driving factors over the (very) long term. This newer paradigm challenges Nature's economy (a concept that, incidentally, Darwin himself believed) and posits disturbance and disequilibrium as the new normal. Climate change on Earth, as it has occurred over hundreds of millions of years, is taken as the usual example. Because my thinking here is informed by ecology, it would be irresponsible not to consider this newer paradigm—welcomed in some quarters, damned in others—and its consequences, for music, cultural policy, and sustainability. I intend to do so in a number of future posts, particularly as I examine the role of music and sound in evolution. Evolution, as I wrote here many months ago, was once a forbidden topic among ethnomusicologists, but climate change effects ideas as well as temperature.

Save the National Heritage Fellowships

2011-02-25T23:04:00.001-05:00

In its unwisdom the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has decided to eliminate the National Heritage Fellowships for folk and traditional artists, folding them into a general category of arts fellowships called Artists of the Year. Folk and traditional artists would have to compete against fine artists for these fellowships, and given the composition of the NEA and its panels, they wouldn’t fare well. The end result would be fewer, or no, fellowships for folk and traditional artists. These fellowships were designed to help save the traditional arts in the United States and now they themselves are endangered.

In 1978 the NEA established a separate division for the folk arts. I had the pleasure of serving on their folk arts panels from 1980-83 and again in the late 1980s, and I was involved in the creation of these fellowships. The idea, initiated and championed by the division's director, Bess Lomax Hawes, was to model them on Japan's awards to individual artists whom they deemed national treasures. NEA—Folk Arts formally established the National Heritage Fellowships in 1981; the first awards were given out in 1982. Every year, a dozen or so exemplary folk and traditional artists were selected—singers, musicians, poets, painters, weavers, blacksmiths, saddle makers, and so forth, representing all regions and ethnic groups in the United States and its territories. They came to Washington to receive their awards. In the first decade or so, CBS newsman Charles Kuralt presented them in a ceremony at the Ford Theater.

These awards were part of a the division’s strategy of targeting endangered folk arts for cultural survival, by honoring exemplary practitioners. It was hoped that the fellowship money would help the artists continue to practice their arts, and that the fellowship’s aura would uplift the status of the artist and the art within the community where it was practiced. They have been given out each year now for nearly thirty years; many had the desired effect of raising the profile of the artist and the traditional art, with the result that others in the communities recognized its worth and some determined to carry it on. This was one aspect of the NEA—Folk Arts division’s forays into cultural sustainability, based on the idea of cultural conservation through the arts. And these are the awards that a short-sighted NEA has determined to get rid of. Even though I believe, now, that there are better means of sustaining musical cultures than targeting endangered ones and singling out exemplary artists for special awards, I find myself upset about the consequences of losing these fellowships.

If Congress had threatened to eliminate these awards, opposing the cuts would be a straightforward act for culture workers to engage in through lobbying. But the NEA itself has offered up these cuts, and so those of us who would mount a lobbying campaign in Congress need to oppose NEA policy and ask Congress to restore the National Heritage Fellowships. Specifically, we are asking that Congress reject the edits proposed in the NEA 2012 Appropriations Request (p. 11) to the General Provisions within the Department of Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriation Act, SEC 419 (1), and restore the words “National Heritage Fellowships.” This would not mean increasing the NEA budget.

Readers of this blog who agree with me may act now and bring this matter to their representatives in the Senate. The paragraph just above has sufficient information to identify what needs to be done. The budget hearing for NEA funding will take place on April 6th. Several public folklorists, applied ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, oral historians, and others interested in cultural sustainability are engaged in this lobbying effort. Please join us. Now is the time to get in touch with your Senator and staff in Washington and urge that the National Heritage Fellowships be saved.

The creative economy and the gift of music

2011-02-19T11:48:00.002-05:00

As readers of this blog know well, I’ve been speaking and writing about an ecological approach to musical sustainability, suggesting that the idea of Nature’s economy and that four principles borrowed from conservation ecology (interdependence, diversity, limits to growth, and stewardship) will help us move towards better best practices in cultural policy. But in my lecture at the University of Texas at Austin, on February 11, I wanted to explore another aspect of cultural policy, the economics of music in terms of the classic distinctions between gift and commodity exchanges. I devoted my lecture to formulating the following question: how can civil society sustain the gift of music when cultural policy is becoming an arm of economic policy?

Music, bought and sold in the marketplace, is usually regarded as a commodity. As a product, such as a recording, music has a commodity value and a market price. As a created object, as intellectual property, music can also be copyrighted and owned; not merely the creation but also the performance—and they may be owned separately, as indicated by the different copyright symbols © and ℗. As an aside, the notion that a person can own a recording, such as a CD or an mp3 file downloaded from the Internet, but not the right to copy and sell that recording, is peculiar. I will have more to say about that in later posts.

Music is also regarded as a gift. That is, music is sometimes experienced as a gift, and one cannot put a price on such an experience. Composers say that sometimes they experience moments when pure inspiration produces music effortlessly and it is as if they are merely the vessels bringing music into the world from another source. Musicians say that sometimes their playing is equally a gift. In many cultures, musical talent is regarded as a gift, innate, and although it can be developed, it cannot be bought or sold. Listeners sometimes say that they experience music as an invaluable gift that enhances their appreciation and understanding.

My friend Lewis Hyde—we first met when he was an undergraduate and I was a graduate student at the University of Minnesota—has written about experiencing art as a gift. In his widely-read and deservedly influential book, The Gift, he recalls that “I went to see a landscape painter’s works, and that evening, walking among pine trees near my home, I could see the shapes and colors I had not seen the day before. The spirit of an artist’s gift can wake our own. The work appeals, as Joseph Conrad says, to a part of our being which is itself a gift and not an acquisition. . . We may not have the power to profess our gifts as the artist does, and yet we come to recognize, and in a sense to receive, the endowments of our being through the agency of his creation” (Lewis Hyde, The Gift [Vintage Books, 1983, p. xii]).

It was the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss who, nearly 100 years ago, drawing on Bronislaw Malinowski’s fieldwork among Trobriand Islanders, posited a difference between societies where economic exchange took place chiefly in the form of gifts, and those societies such as our own where commodity exchange was the norm. His original insight was that in commodity exchanges, the legal contract between buyer and seller obviates the need for any ongoing personal relationship among them; whereas in gift exchanges, the receiver is personally obligated to the giver, ethically if not legally. That is, the receiver feels obliged to give something back, in exchange, to the original giver; or to circulate the gift further.

But cultural policy is quickly and willingly becoming an arm of economic policy. As David Throsby writes in his book The Economics of Cultural Policy, until a decade or so ago, cultural policy among the Western nations was devoted chiefly to subsidizing the arts with direct financial support, whether from corporations, government, or philanthropic individuals. These subsidies were given chiefly to arts organizations such as symphony orchestras, museums, dance companies, and so forth; some monies came to artists directly in the form of fellowships. But in the past decade, according to Throsby, cultural policy has increasingly been positioned as part and parcel of economic policy, and a new term has entered policy discourse to describe this meetingplace: the “creative economy.”

Cultural policy-makers argue that art grows the commodity economy. It does so in three ways. First, cultural tourism which takes in the arts brings tourist money to local economies where heritage spaces, museums, concert halls, and other presentational venues attract an audience. Second, the cultural industries themselves, those involved in the production of mass market art—particularly music—have a large and growing impact on the economy. Third, education in the arts nourishes creativity, and creativity leads to innovation in technology and business, which leads to a competitive edge and economic growth. Cultural tourism, the culture industries, and the way the arts nourish the qualities needed for creativity in the marketplace constitute the creative economy.

Thus my question: how can civil society sustain the gift culture surrounding art in general and music in particular, when music is increasingly viewed as a commodity and when cultural policy, which is the way civil society encourages music, is increasingly becoming an arm of economic policy?

A visit to Portland, Oregon

2011-02-07T23:55:00.001-05:00

    I'm just back from an exciting trip to Portland, Oregon, one of the most environmentally conscious areas of the U.S. Professor Darrell Grant, of the music department at Portland State University, invited me to speak on how music might take a seat at the table where sustainability was under discussion. He'd told me that sustainability was an important topic of conversation in his city, and that much good work was being done; but people were puzzled about how music fit into the civic dialogue. Darrell Grant is an active member of the university and the Portland community, a graduate of the Eastman School of Music, a highly regarded teacher and jazz pianist, and a citizen concerned with the health of the music community and the Portland soundscape. Last fall, out of the blue, he invited me to kick off a series of lectures on music and sustainability sponsored by the music department as part of the university's sustainability initiative. He'd run into this blog, read it, and hoped I'd be willing to share some of my thoughts with the Portland community.

    In addition to the lecture, Darrell arranged a 90-minute morning round table to which he'd invited not only members of the music department and the university at large who were interested in the topic, professors from sociology and English, for example, but also several people involved with the city's soundscape, including urban planners, acoustic ecologists, arts administrators, architects, and the president of the local musicians' union, all for a dialogue around music's place in the city's ongoing efforts at sustainability.

    On Friday morning while eating breakfast I read the city paper, The Oregonian, and found an entire section devoted to "How We Live: Sustainability." The lead article was on Oregon State University's new green energy center; other articles discussed an exhibit of Whale Island petroglyphs from the Wampanum tribe, a documentary film entitled The Economics of Happiness, sponsored by Portland's Center for Earth Leadership, a public symposium on policy planning for the Williamette River watershed, a tree plantation repair work project, meant to improve stream health and restore wildlife habitat, and seeking volunteers; a film about the vanishing bees; and more. Writer Carrie Sturrock's column, "PDX Green" (PDX is the abbreviation for Portland), quoted Dick Roy, of the Center for Earth Leadership: "If everyone became a naturalist and understood the geology of the region and the history of the region and had a commitment to place, then the place we are isn't just a commodity. Then you have a foundation of people living in place who accept deep responsibility for it." Sturrock concluded that "Consequently, it becomes more easy and natural to support local businesses and farmers rooted in place." I felt grateful to be in such an environmentally-conscious place as Portland, with like-minded people.

    The music department representatives spoke about the mission statement they'd drafted concerning music and sustainability, in the process discovering many different interests and voices. I likened this, and the additional voices at the table, to the acoustic ecology of the tropical rain forest, where the voices of birds, reptiles, insects (yes, they make sounds by rubbing parts of their bodies together), and other animals all can be heard, not in a cacophony but each species with their particular acoustic niche, and where they can communicate with one another. A sociology professor picked up on this idea, saying that in her work she's very much concerned with the role of music in the health and solidarity of human communities.

    One of the Portland city community members spoke about music's quality of resilience, both in preference to the term sustainability, and as a supplement to it. He was speaking about the resilience of musical cultures and musicians as well, and instanced resilience as a quality that enabled music to survive in the face of change. This stimulated me to suggest to the group that resilience was one of the more important ecological concepts. A few of the people at the round table were aware that in the last forty years or so the idea that ecosystems tend toward a state of dynamic equilibrium, exemplified in the climax forest, has been severely challenged by an opposite hypothesis, namely that disturbance rather than equilibrium is the natural tendency, that the ecosystem is no system at all, and that entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics characterize the natural world. Against this movement toward disorder, randomness, and chaos, however, I said that the natural world does exhibit resilience; and certainly the resilience of musical cultures is analogous.

    After everyone had a chance to speak and introduce themselves and their concerns, I noted that their concerns fell broadly into two topics: (1) the sustainability of music into the future, and (2) the role of music in the sustainability of life on planet Earth. These concerns, I said, lead us to formulate cultural policy in regard to music. Sustainability is a new word, but cultural policy has been concerned with the sustainability of music for a very long time. For example, music education has been going on for centuries; its goal is the sustainability of music and musical cultures. Beginning in the nineteenth century, efforts were under way to preserve musical artifacts in museums; before that, in private collections. Conservation was another form of cultural policy, ancient in regard to patronage, such as music supported by courts and governments throughout the world; but in the last part of the 20th century, cultural policy involving conservation began to target endangered musics for support, just as conservation efforts in the natural world were targeting endangered species.

    After critiquing targeted interventions, I pointed out that in the last decade or two, cultural policy has moved from conservation efforts in support of music to a view of music as an arm of economic policy, and I mentioned the ways in which cultural policymakers were bringing music and the arts into what was being termed the creative economy, as a spur to technological innovation and economic growth. It was interesting to see some resistance at the round table to the creative economy argument, as if there were something crass about it. Instead, as one of the community members put it, cultural policy should view music as an important component of happiness and well-being. I told them that music, art, gift, commodity, and the creative economy is an area I will be exploring in invited lectures later this winter and spring.

    Toward the end of the long and productive discussion, the talk turned toward the influence of the Internet on the future of music. Professional musicians, indeed the profession of music itself, was going to have to change, said the president of the musicians' union. How would it be possible for professional composers and musicians to continue earning a living, if society was moving away from the idea that musical product and performance is intellectual property that should be protected by copyright? Some felt that it would be difficult for older musicians to adapt, and that the future would see more musicians making less money. Some of the younger people at the table pointed out that while the Internet was moving toward free delivery of recordings, the circulation possibilities for music and access for musicians were increasing enormously, to the point that more musicians would be making more money in the future, not from music available on the Internet, but from concerts and recordings sold at concerts (which were not available on the Internet). Afterward many of the participants mentioned that they had been reading this blog with pleasure and were glad to meet the author; some had been reading it for more than a year or two.

    Friday evening’s lecture concentrated on the implications of the Four Principles from conservation biology (diversity, interdependence, limits to growth, and stewardship) for cultural policy regarding music. I spoke about these, thinking that in such an ecologically-conscious community, this aspect of the topic would be of more interest than others. I spoke about stewardship and partnership, had them sing an Old Regular Baptist lined hymn with me, and then talked at length about how the Old Regular Baptists had been able to conserve and revitalize their 425-year-old singing tradition.

    I was going to conclude by talking about the Lilley Cornett Woods, the only old-growth forest left in eastern Kentucky, but I ran out of time. The Lilley Cornett Woods is located in the same southeastern part of the state as the Old Regular Baptists. In fact, the hymn we listened to, and then sang, was one that I recorded in a church not more than a few miles away from the Lilley Cornett Woods. So I will leave for another time the story of Lilley Cornett and the 500 acres of original growth forest he bought after World War I on his miner’s wages, and preserved because he wouldn’t sell out to the timber cutters and the coal companies. Nor would the Old Regular Baptists sell out to the musical reformers, whether the purveyors of music literacy, shaped notes and gospel music in the 19th century, or the dominance of gospel music (what some of them call "radio songs") in the 20th. It’s not a coincidence that the Old Regular Baptists and the Lilley Cornett Woods inhabit the same geographical and cultural space.

Asking good questions

2011-02-01T12:27:00.000-05:00

This research blog has been a great help in getting some ideas on music and sustainability out there, and in getting some feedback. The seminar I taught last year at Brown in Music and Cultural Policy was also very helpful. At the moment what I'm thinking is this: what are the best, that is, the most fruitful, questions to ask about music and sustainability? As usual, in doing the kind of exploratory research a humanities scholar does, I've been following my interests and inclinations, rather than going along a predetermined route. This is new work; there is no predetermined route, and I believe it would have been premature to try to plan one when I started on this road years ago. As Theodore Roethke wrote, "I learn by going / where I have to go."

Of course, this blog is filled with questions, some asked, many implicit. What are the first ones, the ones that lead down the most promising paths, roads, highways? What are the ones that will help to run patterns and orders that will help us best theorize sustainability and music? This is another way of saying I want to start organizing this research in a systematic way. I've been speaking out and writing about various aspects of the research for six years, and it's getting to be time to put it together in a book before books (or I) become obsolete. This semester is both busy and fortunate in that regard--busy because of my full load of classes and several invited lectures at other universities, and fortunate in that these invitations are to speak about music and sustainability. I look forward to learning a great deal from these interactions, all the while trying to settle on an order and patterned relationship in the questions to ask--and there are many. I'm hoping, through these invited lectures on music and sustainability, all during the next three months at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Portland State University, the University of Michigan, and Indiana University, to organize the questions that will best theorize the topic in an understandable and helpful way. And, of course, I'm hoping we can move further in developing some answers.

Cultural Rights, the Internet, and Sustainability

2011-01-13T22:02:00.003-05:00

Cultural rights are the inherent rights that social groups possess, rights which permit them to sustain their distinctive cultures—in other words, to sustain their ways of thinking and doing. UNESCO extends its proclamations of individual human rights to the distinct ideas and practices of indigenous societies, ethnic minorities, and other social groups whose ways of life are threatened with exploitation or alteration or even with extinction. In the intellectual worlds of folklore and ethnomusicology that I inhabit, Alan Lomax’s “Appeal to Cultural Equity” (1972) is cited as an early statement of cultural rights in the face of what he called “cultural grey-out.” By grey-out he meant that when indigenous societies modernized, they lost their cultural distinctiveness as their people began to think and behave like those in the developed world—for example, as consumers. For Lomax, cultural grey-out was most obvious in music. Western popular music, in particular, Lomax regarded as a homogenizing force.

    As Lomax’s cultural grey-out hypothesis was put to the test, it became clear that societies tended to resist homogenization, particularly in their expressive cultures—the folklife of traditional foodways, song, dance, habitation, myth, craft, and so forth. Nonetheless, Lomax’s proposed solution to musical grey-out was a “global jukebox,” freely available to everyone, and containing recorded (audio and film) examples of all the diverse music found throughout the world. The inherent force of these authentic expressions would overwhelm listeners and ensure their preservation. Lomax was working on this project until he had a stroke in the early 1990s. Nevertheless his dream became a reality in short order, and today the global jukebox is available here and there and everywhere on the Internet.

    Ironically, while the Internet works against cultural grey-out by delivering an enormous amount of distinct information, relatively inexpensive to mount on the world wide web and representing widely differing ways of thinking and doing, this very information revolution is pressuring us toward adopting new and, to some, troubling ethical principles with regard to privacy and intellectual property rights. This pressure affects cultures as well as individuals.

    On one hand, as consumers we want—no, we deserve—free access to information on the Internet, whether music, images, video, opinions, bank and credit card accounts, recipes, consumer guides, newspapers, books, not to mention people's personal information and their whereabouts, blogs and tweets. We envision a future in which all information is on the Internet—everything on an iPhone or an iPad viewed in the palm of the hand and plugged a-socially into the ears. Is this how music will be sustained? Cultures? People? (Never mind, for the moment, that it's all virtual representation, not live performance.)

    Free access is quickly achieving the ethical status of a natural right, a democratization of the information commons. No one will ever have to visit a library or a record or video store again, let alone attend a live performance. Bookshelves?—you don’t need them. Filing cabinets?—digitize what you have and move into the paperless world. Desks? Pens? Paper? Postage stamps? No way. You’ll feel good about it too because your stuff won’t take up so much of a carbon footprint (not to mention physical space).

    On the other hand, what happens to the rights of the creators of this information? International law grants creators intellectual property rights; no one can copy without permission. But the desire for free access on the Internet is changing society’s conceptions about intellectual property. People are talking about “creative commons” and other ways of changing the legal notion of “fair use.” What about cultural rights to traditional knowledge shared by an indigenous group? Doesn’t a social group, in other words, have the right to protect its way of life from exploitation in the marketplace? Instances of cultural robbery abound—songs that have been sampled and stolen without financial or other compensation; native medicinal plant knowledge that “big pharma” has exploited for profit; and so forth. What about cultural knowledge gathered by ethnographers and stored in archives under restricted conditions of access; can archives afford to safeguard this information without delivering it on the Internet?

    The Internet, then, is delivering virtual sustainability while pressuring ethical and legal conceptions of individual and cultural rights. A recent discussion on one of the listserves I follow is a case in point. An archivist who is well aware of the ethical obligations that ethnographers and culture workers feel toward the people and groups from whom they gather information, nevertheless maintains that archives should obtain both ownership and copyright of materials that are donated, so that they may decide without outside restrictions on how to care for and make accessible the information. Rather than act as stewards on behalf of the depositors, archives should give preference to those deposits they will be able to control. Control is one thing if the material is in a locked room and access is granted only to qualified individuals, but it is quite another when the material is on the Internet. As the Internet becomes the only cost-effective delivery system, it will be harder for archives to justify spending scarce resources on maintaining physical materials. It won’t be long before the cultural artifacts moulder away as surely as the objects that once filled the dry storerooms of natural history museums.

    In this way, the Internet enhances cultural rights and sustains culture, but it also diminishes cultural rights and fails to conserve that which cannot, or should not, be represented on it. In promoting free access it brings about the triumph of consumers’ rights at the expense of producers’ and moves toward the elimination of intellectual property rights, whether individual or collective. Nowadays the best way to preserve intellectual property is to give it away. Soon it may be the only way. But heaven help you if you wish to earn your living from it.

Nature's Economy at the Ethnomusicology Conference

2010-11-15T21:43:00.002-05:00

At the annual conference of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Nov. 11-14, 2010, in Los Angeles, I read a paper similar to the one I presented at the folklore conference (see my blog entry for October 26, 2010), but I framed it differently, aiming it at an audience of ethnomusicologists. I wrote about the way my pursuit of music and sustainability is an effort to theorize one aspect of applied ethnomusicology. And because the panel was entitled “Revisioning Science,” I summarized a few things about the historical development of the idea of "Nature's economy," and its relation to natural philosophy (the analytical and experimental side of what we now call science) and to the beginnings of ethnomusicology in the science of comparative musicology. The historical development of economics and, to a lesser degree, ecology also occupied some of my attention.

Rather than reproduce the entire paper here, I will simply reproduce the additional paragraphs, which can be read along with the paper for the folklore conference:

***

"For the past five years I've been speaking and writing on the topic of music and sustainability. In so doing I am theorizing one aspect of applied ethnomusicology, that aspect which concerns applied ethnomusicologists’ desires to give back something to our friends and acquaintances in the musical communities we study, those who have given so much to us, in order to help them sustain their musical practices and move confidently into musical futures of their own choosing.

"Today the “sustainability” concept is omnipresent. If one aspect of sustainability is preservation, then it could be argued that ethnomusicologists got interested in sustainability more than 100 years ago, in their efforts to preserve and display musical documents in archives and museums. But today’s sustainability efforts are attempts to sustain music cultures in situ, rather than only in archives, museums, and on the internet. UNESCO’s international treaty for safeguarding intangible cultural heritage is perhaps the best known contemporary effort at sustaining music cultures, but only the latest in a series of efforts that gathered momentum in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

"Musical sustainability is vastly under-theorized. The most powerful contemporary sustainability discourses occur in the sciences; that is, in the science of ecology and in the science of economics. And so I have been visiting in these sciences to learn how conservation ecologists and developmental economists are thinking about sustainability, with a view both towards critiquing their discourses and gaining insights that might be helpful in theorizing musical-cultural sustainability. Interdisciplinarity, of course, is an old habit in ethnomusicology, for we are both by name and by nature interdisciplinary. We need not apologize for it; it is who we are and what we do….

"This concept (Nature’s economy) may be traced to the ancient Greeks. It became commonplace in eighteenth-century Europe to speak of “the oeconomie of Nature.” The natural and economic realms were governed in the same way, with wealth and commerce explained by natural law. But beginning in the late eighteenth century, in the field of natural philosophy, Nature and the economy parted ways, with the de-naturalization of economics and its emergence as an area subject not to natural law but to human institutions and agency. In the study of Nature, however, the idea of Nature’s economy persisted well into the nineteenth century, although the Deism which justified Linnaeus’s vision of the “oeconomie of Nature” had all but disappeared for Darwin, though “Nature’s economy” remained an important concept for him and he did write about it. After about 1860, however, with the rise of biology and various specialized biological pursuits, “Nature’s economy” lost its force in natural philosophy. Instead, the idea became a mainstay of the conservation movements, which were arising at that time in Europe and a bit later in the United States…..

"Natural history and the idea of “Nature’s economy” will appear quaint to many contemporary scientists. But in order for ethnomusicologists to think interdisciplinarily with science (rather than just do science) it’s important to pay attention to the history of scientific ideas and the history of science as social practice. Michel Foucault famously claimed that the study of Nature had undergone a profound shift around 1800, when the observational, formal, descriptive, classificatory and historical orientation of natural history gave way to an increasing analysis of the inner structures of things and their functions, gradually leading to biological science in the nineteenth century along with the development of various specialties such as experimental morphology, a subject I studied while in college. This is a narrative in which natural philosophy triumphs over natural history to become modern science.

"However, at the risk of disagreeing with Foucault, I believe that the descriptive, classificatory, and historical orientation of natural history was just as useful to those nineteenth century sciences that were most influential on comparative musicology, namely linguistics and Darwinian evolution, as was the analytical orientation of natural philosophy, which could be found in the young scientific specialties embryology and comparative anatomy. I regard natural philosophy and natural history as complementary orientations that have been simultaneously available in the Western world from the Renaissance onward. In the early eighteenth century the Royal Society was run by both the natural philosopher Isaac Newton (its president) and the natural historian Peter Collinson; and as far as I know, they got along. And natural history courses such as botany were normal offerings in American colleges and universities as late as the middle of the twentieth century, after which time they both changed character (to a concentration on the natural history object as an organism) and quickly declined in popularity.

"Not surprisingly, the comparative musicologists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries drew on the orientations of both natural history and natural philosophy. In their fascination with scales and intervals, their transcriptions, analyses, and comparative work Stumpf and Hornbostel and the others were operating as natural philosophers, while in their descriptive, classificatory and historical work (for example, in the Sachs-Hornbostel classification of musical instruments) they were operating as natural historians. Natural history and natural philosophy are always available, just as scientific and humanistic standpoints are always available; and ethnomusicologists will embrace their interdisciplinary perspectives and methods insofar as they answer the questions that ethnomusicologists wish to ask…"

***

After presenting the paper there was an interesting discussion and some critique. One ethnomusicologist took issue with my portrait of economics, saying that I had unfairly “demonized” it. She pointed to environmental economics as a field where the practitioners were taking the natural world into account. I responded that it was the field of developmental economics that I was critiquing most severely. Environmental economics would include Herman E. Daly’s ecological economics, which I acknowledge as an important corrective to neoclassical economics. But I can't give full assent to “sustainable development,” and if environmental economists embrace that concept, then I part ways with them because I don't think they understand all its consequences.

I was asked, also, about transferring management techniques from conservation ecology to cultural sustainability, and given the example of what to do in the face of a forest fire. I replied that forest fires are managed, if possible, considering sometimes contradictory principles; on one hand, when they threaten human settlements, they are fought; on the other, there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that small, controlled fires will burn up the understory and prevent larger, catastrophic ones. Biomimicry would advise the controlled burn, but when human lives and property are threatened, compassion trumps strict biomimicry and decrees that the fire be fought. There had been interesting critique at the folklore conference, also; and I am emailing with a colleague about the issues he raised. I look forward to discussing them in a future entry.

At the folklore conference, about 50 people had come to hear my paper, so for the ethnomusicology conference I imagined the interest would be at the same level. I made 50 handouts for distribution. To my great surprise, about 300 people came to listen to my paper. I was embarrassed and apologetic over having too few handouts. In cases like this, a blog where people can go to read the paper is a great blessing, and so I pointed them here.

DeKoven: Music Appreciation Subversive

2010-11-10T19:40:00.001-05:00

Much about classical music appreciation is middle-class, and middlebrow. The appreciation industry popularizes by simplifying and making classical music accessible, chiefly to people with little or no training as musicians. (For those with more training, music history is taught at a deeper level of musical analysis.) In the nineteenth century, classical music concerts in Europe and America were potpourri of mixed genres, often with soloists whose performances and choice of repertoire appealed to popular rather than cerebral taste. Opera appealed across a wide range of social classes.

One of the more interesting phenomena of the mid-twentieth century was the increasing media representation of classical music, which made it more accessible than ever to the middle classes seeking to "acquire culture." The advent of the long-playing record in the 1950s made it possible to hear lengthy pieces of music with little or no interruption, and major record labels such as Columbia and RCA Victor devoted a substantial part of their budgets and catalogs to classical music in this new format. In the 1960s classical music on LP records expanded with the rise of new companies such as Nonesuch and Turnabout which specialized in recordings of lesser-known composers, and complete sets. Many of their LPs were "budget" priced, and as a result the major labels came out with budget lines, often showcasing great recordings from the past in their budget series. Whereas the 78 era had emphasized music from the nineteenth century, now all centuries and periods were represented. It became possible to accumulate a record library that represented a larger part of the classical music repertoire than ever before. The music of certain periods, particularly the medieval and baroque, became popular among a growing audience of classical music aficionados. On the backs of the record jackets, music critics and journalists offered brief discussions of the structures of the compositions on the recordings, in the language of appreciation-talk. This language, while it addressed elementary structural features, assumed a familiarity with the terminology of basic music theory and was attractively highbrow and slightly mysterious to classical music fans who came to record collecting without any education in music.

Radio was another medium where classical music became more accessible after the middle of the 20th century. Radio stations such as WQXR in New York programmed classical music only, in the 1950s and beyond; in the 1960s FM radio stations down towards the bottom of the dial began to devote their programming largely, if not exclusively, to classical music and later many of these became public radio stations, again with many hours of classical music programming.The phenomenon continued strongly to the end of the century, diminishing somewhat as a greater number of musical choices became available on recordings, radio and, finally, the internet.

Usually the classical music announcers practiced a kind of radio minimalism, seldom doing more than introducing the piece, performer(s) and composer by name, being careful to pronounce the foreign words properly. Occasionally the announcer would venture an anecdote concerning the piece or composer, but almost never would the announcer engage in appreciation-talk of the educational variety. The exception to this rule was a classical music disc jockey named Seymour DeKoven (1903-1984).

DeKoven, who always went by his last name (few listeners knew his first name), produced a syndicated classical music radio program from the 1950s through the 1970s, entitled DeKoven Presents. It featured baroque and rococo music exclusively, or barococo as he often called it. DeKoven would wax as excitedly about a particular composer or composition as a rock deejay would exclaim over the Beatles. With his New York (or was it New Jersey?) accent, along with his brash enthusiasm for pieces he called "out of this world" or "super out of this world" (there were even more superlatives), he presented a marked contrast to the cerebral, minimalist world of the public radio classical music announcers and their finishing-school accents. DeKoven was different in another way, too: he engaged in appreciation talk, instructing the listeners as to the piece (or movement's) basic structure and points of interest much as a college professor would do, except that his overbearing manner could be regarded almost as an unintentional caricature of a music appreciation professor.

DeKoven represented a paradoxical voice, a democratization of classical music; in this he was a throwback to an earlier century. Like the musicians who performed in nineteenth century concerts, he often played single movements rather than the whole piece of music. (The slow movements did not, as a rule, excite him.) He was not only a deejay, but a pitchman; like a televangelist he solicited contributions at the end of his show, threatening the audience that he could not continue to produce and offer it without their sending him money. Finally, he did not hide his prejudices and opinions, but proclaimed them with absolute certainty; and in advancing rococo and baroque music he disparaged the music of other periods. Needless to say, the rather staid classical music establishment was amused--a little--and also contemptuous.

DeKoven was in some ways a precursor of a later democratizing (but far more intelligent) classical music announcer who plied the appreciation trade, Peter Schickele, whose show Shickele Mix has been popular on public radio for a couple of decades. But Schickele is mild and earnest whereas DeKoven was always over the top and seemingly on the verge of exploding. Are there DeKoven shows archived somewhere on the Internet, or in a sound archive somewhere? Once heard, he could not be forgotten, even though some listeners wished to do so. For as much as DeKoven was amusing, he also subverted the refined image of culture that the classical music establishment wished to project.

Music Appreciation, Cultural Tourism, and Cultural Capital--What Is It Worth Today?

2010-11-04T21:37:00.002-04:00

    In this blog's entry dated January 21, 2009, “Is music useless,” I wrote about the classical music appreciation industry, with its paraphernalia of college courses, professors, composers, musicians, concerts, concert-goers and critics, and its media presence, all supported by private, corporate, and government patronage. I’ve also written here, frequently, about heritage and cultural tourism. Now I want to bring the two together, and think about music appreciation as cultural tourism. For if we want to think critically about the contemporary practice of sustaining the traditional arts by constructing them as heritage and then marketing them for tourists, we can look to an earlier model of this very same process in the rise and fall of the classical music appreciation industry, one which is losing relevance daily as the contemporary media engender enormous changes in the way people receive information and in the kind of information we do receive. What might we learn from this example?

    Several years ago I revised my syllabus for an introductory course in ethnomusicology, one meant for music majors at my university. For the most part these are practitioners of music, ones who will take many courses in music-making, and whose courses in music theory, history and appreciation will be taught at a deeper analytical level. The introduction to ethnomusicology course is required of our majors, many of whom would prefer to be off making music themselves, composing, or practicing their vocal or instrumental techniques, than to ponder the ideas and musical curiosities that we ethnomusicologists like to vex ourselves with. I decided to try to reach the students a little closer to where I thought they were, and to turn an ethnomusicological lens on the classical music industry. Never mind that I overestimated their interest in classical music; based on their previous training in Western art music they felt, at least, on more common ground. I decided it would be enlightening to have a look at the prefaces and introductions to the twentieth-century music appreciation textbooks to see what they said about what they were doing and why. We noticed in these textbooks, first of all, a defensive tone—why study music, why is art important in a world where most people are concerned with getting and spending, with family and neighbors and politics and power and war and peace and anything and everything but music?

    These appreciation textbook authors were not hedonists; they did not justify the pursuit of music on the grounds of pleasure, or as aesthetic object, “music for music’s sake.” Such a justification, though it gains assent from music-makers and music-lovers alike, was not suited for the music education business. There must be Purpose, and the purpose was Culture. The authors of the textbooks usually justified appreciation in terms of “acquiring culture,” in the sense that one’s mind and soul would be improved, ennobled, and liberated by encountering the great cultural monuments of the past—Our Musical Heritage, as one textbook was titled. (Interestingly, this particular textbook took a very broad view of that heritage, but that is another story.) Engaging with Great Ideas, Great Art, Heritage, “the best which has been thought and said in the world,” as Matthew Arnold put it in Culture and Anarchy, was, of course, the purpose of a liberal arts education—uh, wasn’t it? This engagement developed taste and refinement in one's personality, a more "civilized" human being, a better person. It is no accident that this is the same justificatory rhetoric that was used to promote the actual Grand Tour, cultural tourism, the European monuments, the museums, the cathedrals, for a century and a half.

    What the authors of these textbooks did not say was that taste, or aesthetic discrimination, leads to collecting and connoisseurship (getting and spending); and that appreciation creates a class of patrons who support the arts. Late twentieth-century cultural theory informs us that music (and art) appreciation builds a kind of cultural capital (that is, knowledge and taste as a stock of cultural goods and strategies) as well as a refined personality that once served the middle classes well in their striving for power.

     But I write "once served," in the past tense, because it is becoming clear that taste matters less and less in the world of common culture (the information commons) and (un)civil discourse, a world dominated by celebrities whose confrontational behavior (whether among politicians or on talk radio or FOX news) is not considered rude and boorish, except by a generation of old-fashioned elders and a small group of young idealists. Ironically, the cultivation of cultural capital is now proving an obstacle, as the refined public personality is no match today for the angry naysayer in the public sphere, or “shock and awe” on the battlefield.

    I am reminded of an observation told to me some years ago by a professor of music, whose discriminatory powers were highly developed. It concerned the makeup of the student body in the appreciation course being taught that semester. “A majority of them are Asian!” the professor exclaimed. “Not that I have anything against people of Asian extraction," he added, "but where are those whose Heritage this really is? They’re the ones who should be taking this course.” But they weren’t, perhaps because they were unconvinced that the course would provide much useful cultural capital for the twenty-first century. And so we may ask what kind of cultural capital, if any, will be useful in our still-new century?

Reconciling Ecology and Economy by means of "Nature's Economy"

2010-10-26T10:57:00.001-04:00

From Oct. 13-16 I was in Nashville, TN for the American Folklore Society conference. For my paper presentation at the conference this year, I returned to an idea that I’ve mentioned on this blog a couple of times before: Nature’s economy. This was the title of Donald Worster’s fine book on the history of ecological thought. Re-reading it, I found the section where Worster tried to explain the phrase, tracing it to the Enlightenment naturalist Gilbert White. The explanation was intriguing in the context of my attempts to find common ground between ecology and economics, and so I decided to read White’s book, The Natural History of Selborne, compiled from letters that he wrote in the mid-1700s. Doing so, I observed White’s use of the phrase “Nature’s economy” (Nature as the greatest economist) and began to think that the concept might point the way towards a reconciliation of the two conflicting discourses over sustainability—those from conservation ecology and from developmental economics. After I delivered the paper—which is printed below—there was a lively discussion with some critique, which I will summarize in a later blog entry. I will also present a version of this paper at the conference of the Society for Ethnomusicology, where it will be framed on a panel asking the question whether ethnomusicology should consider taking a “scientific turn” at this time. Of course, it will depend on what is meant by “science.” But for now, here is my AFS paper:

“Ecology vs. Economics: Reconciling Two Sustainability Discourses for Folklife through the Concept of ‘Nature’s Economy’”

By Jeff Todd Titon, Department of Music, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA

[Paper delivered Oct. 14, 2010, at the annual conference of the American Folklore Society, Nashville, TN]

Just about every other day around noon I take a walk through the woods back of my house, and I see in the forest there the operation of Nature’s economy. In this paper I want to suggest that understanding Nature’s economy is the key that unlocks the door to natural and cultural sustainability by showing a complementary relationship between ecology and economics. For, as I pointed out in my talk at this conference last year, ecology and economy come from the same Greek root, eikos, meaning household. In this paper I claim that managing our cultural household for sustainability rests on our ability to model our cultural interventions upon the way Nature’s economy manages the earth’s household.

Sustainability entered the folklife discourse with Alan Lomax’s “Appeal for Cultural Equity” (1972) and the 1983 report on The Conservation of Culture, coordinated by Ormond Loomis for the American Folklife Center. It entered developmental economics and policy planning with the 1987 Brundtland Commission Report on sustainable development. Since then, cultural sustainability has been invoked to support UNESCO’s conventions on safeguarding folklife, or intangible cultural heritage, where it enjoys great currency and has been the subject of considerable attention from folklorists and ethnomusicologists. However, the roots of sustainability may be found in the lay knowledge of natural historians; and in particular in the idea of “Nature’s economy.”

However appealing sustainability is conceptually, it remains open to a variety of interpretations, ideologies, and practices. In this paper I first review how sustainability operates in two principal scientific areas, ecology and economics. For although the words come from the same root, their meanings have diverged to the point where contemporary mainstream economists do not think of the natural world at all except in terms of resource exploitation. Second, I review two discourses of alternative economics, namely economic anthropology and ecological economics, and conclude that although each remains promising, neither one at present is able to reconcile the contemporary differences over sustainability among developmental economists and conservation ecologists. Third, I attempt to integrate ecology and economics under the concept of “Nature’s economy.” This concept does not originate with me; it may be traced through a line of naturalists from Gilbert White in the mid-18^th century through Henry David Thoreau in the mid-19^th, then to Sir Albert Howard, the founder of the organic gardening movement in the early 20^th century, and then to a variety of cultural and agricultural visionaries in the late 20^th century that include Aldo Leopold, Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson. As a concept, Nature’s economy begins with the idea that Nature is the greatest economist; as developed by organic farmers, it means that agriculture should wherever possible imitate Nature; and insofar as the concept may prove useful in the cultural realm, it means that culture workers have their best chance of success when imitating the patterns found in Nature. Finally, I outline a number of design and management principles that follow from the concept of Nature’s economy, principles that culture workers may find useful in their interventions on behalf of cultural sustainability.

Last year at AFS I prepared the following diagram, which may be helpful still in reviewing the contemporary sustainability discourse in ecology and economics:

CONSERVATION ECOLOGY ECONOMY

Sustainable populations Sustainable economic growth

Conservation Development

Endangered Species Resources

Targeted -> Systems Approach Targeted approach

Stewardship Property and Ownership

Equilibrium (Disequilibrium) Prosperity

Gifts of nature, wonder Commodity exchange & fetishism

Co-existence Human dominance

Conservation policy Economic and cultural policy

Diversity (Concentration) Efficiency

Summarizing what I spoke about last year, conservation ecologists target endangered species; they intervene to protect and sustain populations. Developmental economists target resources; they intervene to manage sustainable economic growth. Conservation ecologists value diversity; economists value efficiency. Both are engaged in policy-making, but conservation ecologists, like organic farmers, proceed from the principle of human co-existence with the natural world, whereas developmental economists consider the natural world in terms of resources for human welfare. Economists are driven to think of their world in terms of property, commodities and exchange, whereas conservation ecologists look to the cycle of growth, death, decay, and reproduction in natural world as their model. One could say that economists look forward to a world of prosperity while ecologists hope for a world of equilibrium with its connotations of justice and equity.

Confronted, late in the twentieth century, with a world of diminishing natural resources, economists embraced the concept of sustainability, as it pertained to both growth and development. Not only do institutions like the World Bank promote sustainable development along with modernization in the Third World, but economists prescribe growth for whatever ails Western economies. Meanwhile corporate conglomerates jump on the sustainability bandwagon, promoting themselves as “green” enterprises good for the planet. When Monsanto proclaims that it is “green” and that its combination of pesticides and genetic seed modifications produce a healthier world ecosystem, it is time to seek out alternatives.

Alternative economics are available, both “in the past” and “over there.” Can we learn anything about sustainability from production, consumption, and exchange among indigenous peoples? The literature of economic anthropology contains at least one provocative line of thought: the contrast between gift economies and commodity economies; yet while the interpretations support the idea that these two kinds of exchange encourage different kinds of human relations, personal and impersonal, with obvious social implications, they do not directly support a hypothesis that gift economies value resource sustainability any more than commodity economies do. Do people in indigenous societies have more awareness of the natural world than people in modern, Western ones; and if so, has this led them to practice sustainability? The answer to the first question is yes, but the answer to the second is contested, with some scholars (and natives) arguing on behalf of indigenous peoples as conservationists and others taking the opposite view. Early economic anthropologists assumed that neoclassical economics did not apply to indigenous economies and sought similarities between them and pre-capitalist Western economies, rejecting the ideal of the “economic man” who always tries to act in such a way as to maximize material wealth with the least effort. Instead, the early economic anthropologists embedded indigenous economic behavior in culture, explaining apparently irrational economic behavior terms of what Melville Herskovits termed “mythological thinking” (Herskovits 1952: 492).

But how could economics be a science if it could not explain economic behavior in all societies? By the 1970s a reaction occurred; economic anthropologists, whether formalist or neo-Marxist, blew away the fog of mythological thinking and attempted to demonstrate how economic behavior in indigenous societies was both rational and materialistic. By 1990 the powerful post-structuralist critique of science that overtook cultural anthropology was returning economic anthropology to a kind of relativism emphasizing, once more, the primacy of local knowledge. This would have amused Malinowski, who is credited with introducing the idea, 100 years ago, that cultural anthropology must first of all grasp the native’s point of view in its own terms. In this way economic anthropology has followed the intellectual trends of its parent discipline, while the evidence it offers concerning sustainability is both equivocal and contested.

Besides economic anthropology, a second alternative to mainstream economics is provided by ecological economics, a discipline founded, named, and developed by economist Herman E. Daly beginning in the 1970s. Daly’s bona fides include working for six years in the 1990s as a senior economist with the World Bank as well as holding various professorships in the United States. I’ve written extensively about Daly and ecological economics on my research blog; time permits only a brief summary here. Daly indicts mainstream economists for failing to understand limits to growth because they do not realize that economies are not worlds unto themselves, but that like all human institutions they are constrained by Nature. If we bear in mind the classic economic concept of marginal utility, then when the costs of growth outweigh its benefits we have what Daly terms “uneconomic growth,” or growth that is harmful rather than beneficial. Today the most obvious consequence of uneconomic growth is global warming.

Instead of embedding economics in culture, as economic anthropologists do, Daly embeds economics within the earth’s ecosystem, endorsing policies that promote “sustainable yield.” He critiques economic development policies based on the concept of sustainable growth, which he claims is an oxymoron because unlimited growth is unsustainable. On the other hand, he endorses the principle of sustainable development. Quoting Daly, “when something grows it gets bigger. When something develops it gets different.” For Daly, development does not necessarily imply growth; but this distinction between growth and development is lost on most people, including developmental economists, and may have been one of the reasons Daly resigned from the World Bank. Ecological economics does provide a real model for cultural sustainability contextualized within the natural world, but at present it remains wedded to Daly’s interpretation of sustainable development, which unfortunately attracts developers who pretend that there are such things as smart growth and clean coal. Is there no way to reconceive the two discourses, ecology and economics, to bring them together in a complementary relationship?

I think there is. The clue is in a line of lay knowledge and practice spread among naturalists from the Enlightenment to the present, and its contemporary extensions into a variety of related social, political, and food/shelter/transportation/place expressions, involving lay empowerment and an emphasis on recovering the commons with an emphasis on the local, organic, and participatory. I trace this line of knowledge and practice to natural history and the concept of Nature’s economy, and to its corollary, biomimicry, or the principle of following Nature in cultural design and management.

The influential thinkers in the twentieth century’s first wave of agricultural environmentalism understood the connections between nature and culture in just this way. Wendell Berry, for example, approached both culture and agriculture in his 1977 book, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, pointing out that both words come from an Indo-European root meaning “to dwell.” Let us recall that “household” is root meaning of the words economy and ecology. In this way, we are able to view the culture of agriculture as dwelling within the earth household. In his 1981 essay “Solving for Pattern,” Berry remarked that “a bad solution solves for a single purpose such as increased production in ignorance or deliberate disregard of the larger patterns in which it is contained.” The obvious examples of bad agricultural solutions are chemical pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and genetically modified crops. These mistakes follow the law of unintended consequences and ignore the principle of interconnectedness, one of the four principles culture workers can learn from the science of conservation ecology: interconnectedness, diversity, limits to growth, and stewardship. But these principles did not originate with latter-day environmentalists, alternative agriculturists, or conservation ecologists; they are implicit in the concept of “Nature’s economy.” Again, the idea is that Nature is the “great economist,” in the sense that everything is interconnected and nothing is wasted. Here I quote from Gilbert White’s observations in The Natural History of Selborne, Letter VII, written about 1765:

“A circumstance respecting these ponds [in Selborne], though by no means peculiar to them, I cannot pass over in silence; and that is, that instinct by which in summer all the kine, whether oxen, cows, calves, or heifers, retire constantly to the water during the hotter hours; where, being more exempt from flies, and inhaling the coolness of that element, some belly deep, and some only to mid-leg, they ruminate and solace themselves from about ten in the morning till four in the afternoon, and then return to their feeding. During this great proportion of the day they drop much dung, in which insects nestle; and so supply food for the fish, which would be poorly subsisted but from this contingency. Thus nature, who is a great economist, converts the re-creation of one animal to the support of another!” (White 1908 [1788]: 30).

White’s vision of Nature’s economy integrates ecology with economy; things are recycled and nothing is wasted.

Sir Albert Howard, the founder of the organic gardening movement, also understood these interconnections, and extended them to humankind. In his 1940 book, An Agricultural Testament, he wrote: “The whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal and man [is] one great subject.” Howard advanced the other key idea, biomimicry, or following nature’s economy, when he wrote that the way “Nature manages her land [must] form the basis of all our studies of soil fertility. What are the main principles underlying Nature’s agriculture? These can most easily be seen in operation of our woods and forests.” As I wrote earlier, I see these principles in operation every time I walk in the woods behind my house. They include biodiversity rather than monoculture; and the cycling of plant and animal waste into the forest soil that produces the food for the next generation of plants and animals. For Howard and a few thousand pioneers in 1940, and today for the tens of millions of people who produce and consume organic agriculture, managing agriculture means managing in imitation of Nature. The definition of organic gardening contained in Rodale’s Organic Gardening Encyclopedia reads: “The balance of Nature must be respected. Each part has its own sphere of activity as well as fusing with and complementing other related parts. A substance that alters one part, for instance, may affect half a dozen others—most often to our own disadvantage. . . . The soil is a storehouse of living organisms which must be fed and cared for as any others. . . Organic gardening or farming is a system whereby a fertile soil is maintained by applying Nature’s own law of replenishing it. . . .” (Rodale 1973: 794-795).

Imitating Nature inspires Wes Jackson’s contemporary work at the Land Institute, in Kansas. In response to the problem of agribusiness and its depletion of natural resources, Jackson undertook a plant breeding program based on what he saw in the perennial state of the original Kansas prairie. One example involves cross breeding annual wheat with perennial grass to make a perennial wheat. It would be planted once; it would replenish the soil; and some could be harvested each year. Interviewed by National Public Radio in 2009, he said that “The solution is to build an agriculture based on the way nature’s ecosystems work” [NPR story, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=113766846]

Biomimicry follows from the idea that Nature is the great economist in earth’s household. Thus ecology and economy, Nature, culture, and agriculture are brought together in a single discourse. Another contemporary manifestation of sustainability through biomimicry is found in the Permaculture movement. Permaculture, a portmanteau word made from “permanent agriculture” and “permanent culture,” is, in the words of its most influential thinker, Australian Bill Mollison, “an approach to designing human settlements and agricultural systems that mimic the relationships found in natural ecologies.”

In conclusion, the various design and management principles that follow from Nature’s economy and biomimicry integrate nature with culture and offer strategies to culture workers acting in stewardship to the public interest. Folklorists are well aware of some but perhaps not others; it is their integration that I have been seeking here. I end this presentation with a few of those design and management principles:

(1) Observe patterns in Nature that connect all living beings and design with these in culture. Do not impose form; in Nature form follows function. Manage for whole systems; do not offer single solutions.

(2) Encourage cultural and biodiversity as a strategy for sustainability through adaptation and dynamic change. Encourage revitalization movements that recycle tradition and know that in order to survive, tradition must be dynamic.

(3) From organic agriculture to culture, apply the principle “Feed the soil, not the plant.” Do not intervene to bolster specific expressive cultural genres—these will come and go naturally, and today in the internet age all are capable of staying in one form or another. Direct support to the social, political, and economic conditions or the cultural soil under which expressive cultures flourish and upon which they depend.

(4) Nature rewards cooperation and demands local expertise; culture workers should partner with local scholars and practitioners, ascertain their desires and goals, and work towards mutual ends and rewards.

References

Lomax, Alan. 1972. “An Appeal for Cultural Equity.” The World of Music, 14:3-4, 9.

Brundtland Commission Report. 1987. Our Common Future. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

Howard, Sir Albert. 1940. An Agricultural Testament. Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press.

Loomis, Ormond, coordinator. 1983. The Conservation of Culture. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, American Folklife Center.

White, Gilbert. 1908 [1788]. The Natural History of Selborne. London: Cassell.

Herskovits, Melville. 1952 [1940]. Economic Anthropology: The Economic Life of Primitive Peoples. New York: Norton.

Rodale, J. I., and staff. 1973. Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening. Emmaus, PA: Rodale Books.

Anthropological Economics, Heritage, and Musical Sustainability

2010-10-04T10:02:00.001-04:00

     The most influential thinker upon economic anthropology during early period (approximately 1940-1970) was Karl Polanyi, whose book The Great Transformation (1944) contrasted medieval European peasant economies with later capitalistic ones. For Polanyi, the “transformation” was not only a transformation of economic institutions but a transformation in the way of thinking about property, commerce, money, capital, and above all, social relations. Although for personal, political reasons he denied any connection between his thought and that of Karl Marx, the connections are obvious.

    Although Polanyi was not an anthropologist, his influence on economic anthropology was enormous and he remains a seminal thinker in the field. Like Herskovits, he promoted a cultural approach to economics, rejecting the classical and neoclassical construction of “economic man” and replacing it with an actor embedded in the social and cultural thought (Herskovits would have called it mythology) of his or her society. This approach to economics he called “substantivism,” and he contrasted it with the neoclassical approach, which he called “formalism,” maintaining all the while that formalism was not suitable for understanding economics in pre-literate societies. The implication was, of course, that it was unsuitable for understanding economics in developed Western societies as well; for economic decision-making and institutions are easily viewed as culturally embedded in the West as elsewhere.

    Polanyi's work was critiqued—by formalists—and gradually, beginning in the 1960s, economic anthropologists began relying on materialist rather than "mythological" explanations for economic transactions and institutions in pre-literate societies, to the point where in the 1970s and 1980s formal, quantitative, mathematical models prevailed. It appeared that principles of neoclassical economics could be applied universally with satisfactory results. “Formalism” in economic anthropology had re-established an “economic man” guided by principles of maximizing material well being at the center of many, if not all, non-literate societies as well as in developed economies.

    As the twentieth century came to a close, the powerful critique of cultural anthropology from within, based on post-structuralist, post-colonial Theory, attacked formalist approaches to economic anthropology, substituting instead the competing approach that has been dubbed “culturalism”: understanding a people’s economic thinking in their own terms or trying, as one would say now, to understand it in terms of local knowledge. In so doing, economic anthropology has, ironically, moved full circle back to Malinowski, who advanced the thesis, in his book Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), that anthropology must be directed at grasping the native’s point of view in the native’s own terms. (Of course, for Malinowski, grasping the native’s way of thinking was only a starting point; ethnographic analysis and ethnological comparison followed on).

    This post-structuralist strain within contemporary economic anthropology directs us at looking at local knowledge in order to better strategize sustainability for cultural as well as natural resources. In this reading a partnership, however uneasy, between local and comparative-based knowledge, so-called lay and expert knowledge, brings diversity to the enterprise and has the best opportunity for success.

    In our new century, a (predictable) reaction against post-structuralism has advanced formalism once more, to the point that formalist models now compete with culturalist ones, while a revival of interest is promoting Polanyi’s substantivist perspective. Formalists would direct culture workers towards “economic man” models stressing that sustainability of musical cultures depends on the degree to which they reward desires for material well-being. To that we may add desires for the social and cultural capital which participation in art worlds such as music provides.

    From a practical standpoint, commodification of music and heritage tourism do provide a certain degree of social and cultural capital, and of course there is a good deal of material culture surrounding the production and consumption of music, whether “gear” for producing music, or iPods and the like for consuming it. (Only a couple of decades ago one could speak of “cassette culture” and boom boxes.) More and more sophisticated, computer-based tools of music production are becoming available to lay individuals, while internet access offers unprecedented opportunities for individuals to market their own music. Whereas twenty years ago musicians had to depend on the recording industry to get their music out beyond what they could do with personal appearances, today virtually all commercially-oriented musicians in developed economies make their own music available directly via the internet. Economic anthropologists of a formalist bent would urge culture workers toward a “realistic” view of music’s place in the economy, in effect advising those musical cultures interested in sustainability to join the marketing bandwagon. Giving music the cachet of heritage, in this way of thinking, adds value in marketing, and provides cultural capital for those who are willing to place a value on traditional music, thereby sustaining it.

    As I’ve written earlier in this research blog, marketing heritage is the prevailing strategy among contemporary culture workers who would effect policy in the direction of sustaining music. Make certain that traditional music takes up its rightful place in the global jukebox that the internet has become. Make it prominent among available choices for musicians and fans; encourage it however one can by adding value through heritage designations and attracting tourists. Those who remain uneasy with the commodification of traditional music are dismissed as idealists, romancers of the folk, and so forth. Are they? Further exploration of economic thinking in terms of musical commodities and their alternatives (usually conceived of as gifts) may offer some answers, putting us back again in Polanyi’s “great transformation” way of framing the questions concerning sustainability of music cultures.

Early Anthropological Economics

2010-09-30T13:15:00.002-04:00

Neoclassical economists take Euro-American economies as their principal subject of study, just as musicologists take Euro-American music as theirs. And just as it is short-sighted for musicologists to take Western music to stand for all music (see this blog, Feb. 6, 2009 entry), so in the context of my continuing exploration of ecology/economy, it would short-sighted to think Euro-American economies are fully representative of all economies. Looking at economic thought and behavior in non-Western (and early Western) societies should offer alternative possibilities and strategies for sustainability, both natural and cultural. This includes music, and it brings me to economic anthropology.

Economic anthropology as a sub-specialty within cultural anthropology developed in the US beginning around the time of World War II. Economic transactions in so-called primitive societies were an important topic for early twentieth-century anthropologists, especially because economic behavior of then-called primitive societies sometimes puzzled them. Malinowski's Trobriand Islanders and the Native Americans of the US Northwest Coast appeared to waste resources uneconomically. Western economists had assumed (and still do) that human beings always try to act in their economic best interests, to grow rich with the least amount of effort. “Economic man” came to be associated with rationality, self-interest, and the accumulation of material wealth; in John Stuart Mill’s words, “as a being who inevitably does that by which he may obtain the greatest amount of necessaries, conveniences, and luxuries, with the smallest quantity of labour and physical self-denial with which they can be obtained.” (See J.S. Mill, “On the Definition of Political Economy, and on the Method of Investigation Proper to It," 1836.)

As anthropologists studied their ways of life, information on indigenous economic thought and behavior accumulated. Some behaved as “economic man” did in the West; some did not. One of the first attempts at a comparative economics was Melville Herskovits’ Economic Anthropology: the Economic Life of Primitive Peoples (1940, 1952). He came to comparative economics with Cold War era questions concerning collectivity and economic determinism: whether “primitive” (by 1952 he was calling the societies “non-literate”) economies were based chiefly on individual or collective efforts; and the degree to which economic choices determined the rest of a people’s way of life. But he also considered sustainability in terms of tribal practices that seemed uneconomic or wasteful, such as the deliberate destruction of property, and not in the best interests of economic efficiency. As an anthropological relativist, he concluded that cultural reasons trumped economic ones: “economic considerations will not prevail over mythological ones if the latter are strong enough” (Herskovits, Economic Anthropology (New York: Norton, 1952), p. 492.)

Neoclassical economists, not surprisingly, faulted Herskovits' understanding of economics. For them, the science of economics must apply to all cases; otherwise it could not be a science. There could not be one science of economics for developed economies and another for non-literate societies. Economist Frank Knight argued that Herskovits failed to comprehend that economics is a theoretical science based on principles which describe ideal, not actual, economic behavior. “Economic man,” according to Knight, is not meant to describe how people do behave; it aims at describing how, in the abstract, absent other considerations, they would behave. The behavior of economic man in an ideal world is analogous to the way an object would remain in motion in the physical world were it not for friction. Herskovits replied that, to an anthropologist, the facts on the ground, actual economic behavior, must be the starting point—that anthropological economics must be an inductive and practical science, deriving principles from actual behavior, and not the deductive science that Knight postulated. Actual economic behavior among non-literate peoples was not always rational in the Western sense; if one wanted to understand the economies of non-literate peoples, one needed to understand how “mythology” directed economic behavior. This was a different goal than Knight's.

Separating the mythological (or ideological) considerations from the economic ones is no longer so simple, if it ever was. Veblen’s famous early twentieth-century work on “leisure class” economics showed that waste, or conspicuous consumption, did have economic advantage, in that a conspicuous consumer would be regarded as a wealthy, powerful person and be treated with due respect. In understanding the apparently inefficient behavior involved in the economics of art, it’s important to take into account social capital (roughly, a storehouse of trust and reliability among people who interact with one another) and cultural capital (roughly, a storehouse of taste, which includes appreciation of the fine arts, and which enables one to travel among the refined and wealthy.) All of this “mythological” activity, this accumulation of social and cultural capital (knowledge, reputation, authority), is critical to any understanding of the ways in which musical cultures may be sustained, for behavior in relation to music cannot always be explained by recourse to the “economic human.”

Ecological Awareness

2010-09-10T20:46:00.000-04:00

From ecological economics we move (temporarily) to ecological awareness. Many Americans and some Europeans reading this blog will remember playing “cowboys and Indians” when growing up. Some merely imagined themselves one or the other; others donned a bit of costume such as a buckskin shirt and moccasins, or they wore a cap pistol in a holster. (Interestingly, my Native American friends have told me that they, too, played cowboys and Indians when growing up.) The Indian stepped silently through the woods in his or her moccasins, with senses keenly attuned to nature. Young Boy and Girl Scouts learn woodsmanship: how to get along in the wilderness. Hunting, fishing, building a fire, making shelter, survival skills: all these require a kind of ecological awareness of the natural world unavailable in the course of ordinary life to youngsters living protected lives in cities and suburbs; and so for some it becomes a kind of serious recreation. Euro-American culture values ecological awareness, as it values nature.

Do (or did) native or indigenous peoples acquire ecological awareness that leads to sustainability practices? If so, there is something to be learned from them. Anthropologists who study the pre-European contact lifeways of tribal societies agree that their peoples are ecologically aware; indeed, this feature is oft remarked on in popular anthropology, whether it is the Eskimos’ forty or so different words for different snow conditions, or the Australian natives’ intricate mental mapping of the landscape. But whether their ecological awareness led to practices that we would call sustainable turns out to be a more difficult question to answer.

It is more difficult because it is unclear whether their traditional economies were maintained over thousands of years prior to European contact because ecological awareness led to sustainable practices, or because the available technology was unable to exploit the resources to the point of exhaustion. Indeed, if resources such as game grew scarce, a smaller human population was supported until the resources were renewed. Anthropologists have looked hard to find instances of ecological awareness among tribal peoples leading to conservation and sustainability practices, but a recent review of the scholarly literature concludes that except in a few cases, indigenous groups exploited resources to exhaustion when new technology (e.g., guns, horses) made this possible. Of course, one could argue that new technology and contact with European cultures may have caused the disequilibrium, but whatever the cause, it would appear that the indigenous peoples’ ecological awareness did not lead to sustainable practices. Seymour Krech’s The Ecological Indian (1999) concluded, for example, that “little or no evidence could be found for conservation among Native Americans prior to contact and plenty of evidence demonstrated a lack of conservation during the contact period. . . . This view is consistent with major reviews of the conservation literature in the ethnographic world” (Raymond Hames, “The Ecologically Noble Savage Debate,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 2007, p. 178).

Does this mean that there is nothing to be learned about sustainability from indigenous ecology? I would not rush to such a conclusion. For one thing, in the midst of the current sustainability debates, indigenous cultures have mounted legal actions based on the relation between ecology and cultural property rights, viewing nature in terms of what my friend Nathan calls a “sacred ecology” and claiming property rights to various natural resources on the land, basing those claims on traditional beliefs and practices which may be and often are in a revival phase within the native groups. In the midst of these debates, indigenous peoples, even if they did not practice sustainability in the past (when perhaps they felt no need to do so), are acutely aware of sustainability issues today. Further, it’s inconceivable to me that the more tradition-minded among them did not ponder and enact strategies for sustaining their traditional cultures in the face of Western colonial and cultural onslaught. To deny them deliberation in this way—that is, to deny that they thought about sustainability—is to perpetuate the myth of the unself-conscious, unreflective, savage. The strategies they adopted, and are adopting, in the face of such difficult odds, would indeed repay study.

Why Sustainable Development Must Be Abandoned

2010-09-02T12:57:00.001-04:00

The ecological economist Herman E. Daly insists on a basic distinction between “sustainable growth” and “sustainable development.” Sustainable growth is impossible because continual growth is impossible; as an economic goal it is bad policy. Sustainable development, on the contrary, is for Daly both possible and desirable. Let’s look at Daly’s argument in his own words:

“Because qualitative and quantitative change are very different it is best to keep them separate and call them by the different names already provided in the dictionary. To grow means ‘to increase naturally in size by the addition of material through assimilation or accretion.’ To develop means ‘to expand or realize the potentialities of; to bring gradually to a fuller, greater, or better state.’ When something grows it gets bigger. When something develops it gets different. The Earth ecosystem develops but does not grow. Its subsystem, the economy, must eventually stop growing but can continue to develop. The term ‘sustainable development’ therefore makes sense for the economy but only if it is understood as ‘development without growth’ — i.e., that qualitative improvement of a physical economic base that is maintained in a steady-state by a throughput of matter-energy that is within the regenerative and assimilative capacities of the ecosystem. Currently the term ‘sustainable development’ is used as a synonym for the oxymoronic ‘sustainable growth.’ It must be saved from this perdition” (“Sustainable Growth: An Impossibility Theorem,” in Valuing the Earth, edited by Herman E. Daly and Kenneth N. Townsend, MIT Press, 1993, pp. 267-8).

Can the term "sustainable development" be saved? (And is it worth saving?) My own view is that it is more difficult now than ever to do so. As a scientist, Daly understands that scientific terms have correct and incorrect definitions, and that their meanings may be controlled by a community of scientists granted such authority. In science this is indeed the case; terms like “force” and “energy” do have precise scientific meanings, and one of the goals of science education is to make certain that students understand exactly what these terms mean in the world of physics. But in the world of public debate, as Daly also understands, it is very difficult to patrol the borderlands of word meanings, particularly when words become laden with values. (He writes elsewhere about this ability of certain words to contain both themselves and their opposites.) Sustainability itself is one such word. Development is another.

Daly made a mistake, I think, in turning to “the dictionary” as he did. Perhaps he went to a dictionary and found the definition of development that suited his meaning. However, there is more than one current definition; Daly’s is not the only one. Indeed, the definition of “develop” has, itself, developed. The Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (OED) tells us that the English word “develop” comes from the Old French, desveloper, literally to un-enclose, to unwrap, to expose. In England "develop" was first used in the 18th century and it had this same meaning: to unfold and bring out a potential that was already latent. It still has this meaning, and this is the meaning that Daly takes from the word. Daly writes that “Sustainable development [is] development without growth—that is, qualitative improvement without quantitative increase” (Daly, Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development, p. 3).

But the OED recognizes another meaning for development, involving evolution and growth. Identification of the word development with growth came by the mid-19th century through botany (a plant develops and grows through its life cycle) and evolution (a progressive movement from simpler to more complex life forms). And in the late 19th century the word began to take on a growth orientation for property as well as for organisms. Development came to mean to realize the potentialities and value of a site, estate, property, and so forth by converting it to a new purpose or making it suitable for residence, industry, or business. By 1966, my first year of graduate school, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary defined “develop” both in the sense of “unfolding” and in the sense of growing. To develop was “to evolve, differentiate; broadly, to grow.” Today’s most frequently used on line dictionary, Dictionary.com, also invokes the earlier definition, “to bring out the capabilities or possibilities”; but its usage example suggests growth: “to develop natural resources.” Dictionary.com also identifies development directly with growth: “to cause to grow or expand.”

In short, as much as Daly would have us understand the term “sustainable development” as sustainable change without growth, it is impossible for him or anyone else to fix its meaning. Those who wish to think of sustainable development as synonymous with sustainable growth have dictionary authority to do so, just as Daly has for its opposite. No one has the authority to impose a single meaning on this word today. Just as human beings run into trouble when we try to dominate or “master” the natural world, so we cannot “master” the meanings of words. We are, at best, their stewards.

Lewis Carroll, author of Through The Looking-Glass (1872), understood this more than one hundred years ago. In a famous passage from that book, Humpty Dumpty has this conversation with Alice:

    “I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’ Alice said.
    Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’”
    “But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument,’” Alice observed.
    “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
    “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
    “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”

But much as Humpty Dumpty would have it otherwise, it is the words that are masters. It is a mistake to think that one can control the meaning of words in public discourse. One can, of course, try to shape public understanding, but doing so with words that signify in unfortunate ways strikes me as being what Daly would term “uneconomic”; that is, cost outweighs benefit. And so it is time to abandon the term “sustainable development” and look for others, such as continuity, whose meanings are more congruent with the dynamics of tradition. Otherwise sustainability, in music as elsewhere, will become captive to the destructive idea that music cultures must grow in order to sustain themselves.

Sustainable Growth as an Oxymoron

2010-09-02T12:40:00.000-04:00

Many of the big players on the international stage think that "smart" or "sustainable" growth is the best solution to the big problems today. Not only a bigger pie, but a smarter recipe. Is sustainable growth indeed possible? Or are the terms self-contradictory, an oxymoron? Several years ago Tom and Ray Magliocci, the “Click and Clack” of the NPR radio program Car Talk, talked about morons and oxymorons. One of them had said that such and such a thing, such as an inexpensive Mercedes-Benz, was an oxymoron. “Who are you calling a moron?” replied the other. Yet there is something moronic about an oxymoron, particularly one like sustainable growth.

Herman E. Daly’s ecological economics places the world of economic production and consumption squarely within the constraints of the natural world ecosystem, and in so doing he critiques today’s economists’ emphasis on growth. If anyone doubts where contemporary economists stand on growth, they have only to review current government policy regarding the so-called great recession. Economic policy makers such as Federal Reserve head Ben Bernanke view growth as the remedy for the problems supposedly caused by a contracting economy. (The causes, of course, are far more fundamental, and they are bound up in the way people think about human beings, the natural world, property, rights, production, consumption, wealth, money, work, life, ethics, pleasure, and leisure, among other things.) Indeed, economists frame recessions in terms of growth versus contraction in the gross national (domestic) product. We must produce and consume our way out of this predicament, according to the economists. Produce more! Buy more! Spend more! Save less! Put people back to work making more product so that the cycle of growth and progress can continue. This is neo-classical economics in action, dominating contemporary policy.

In his early writings, Daly argued that the economic world ought to be viewed as tending toward a steady-state (equilibrium) rather than continually progressing and growing. In so doing, he was following the consensus among ecologists that ecosystems tend toward states of equilibrium. (As I wrote earlier in this research blog, this consensus among ecologists eroded in the last decades of the twentieth century; but more on that later.) After the Brundtland Report, Daly began using the increasingly common term “sustainable development.” He did so in an interesting and characteristic way.

To back-track a bit, one of the reasons the term sustainable development has gained popularity is that its meaning can be understood broadly; that is, because it is capable of many interpretations, policy makers can find ways in which it suits their inclinations. The Brundtland Report did not define sustainability in detail, saying only that sustainable development is "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." (This, of course, makes the strange assumption that the needs of future generations can somehow be known in the present.) In the nearly 25 years since the Brundtland Report, economists, environmentalists, ecologists, and to the dismay of many, corporate conglomerates have jumped on the sustainable development bandwagon.

Everyone wants to be green, today. My state public radio network, a non-profit corporation with employees and a Board, instituted an “evergreen friend” category of support. If instead of sending in a check after a telephoned pledge you agree to have a certain amount of money deducted monthly from your charge cards, you will "save a tree." It turns out that the trees saved would otherwise have gone to paper for fundraising letters, checks, and the like. How many trees can be saved by a few thousand evergreen friends? Ten? Two? I guess the idea is to have everyone do their part, however small. But the problem is much bigger than this.

Daly, predictably, has little use for such imprecision. In his textbook Ecological Economics, he explains what he means by “sustainable” in the context of “yield”; i.e., sustainable yield, as in a forest in which the re-growth exceeds the amount harvested or lost for other reasons such as disease and fire. In his more popular writings he takes great pains to define sustainable development in contradistinction to sustainable growth. He writes: “The term ‘sustainable growth’ when applied to the economy is a bad oxymoron” (“Sustainable Growth: An Impossibility Theorem,” in Valuing the Earth, edited by Herman E. Daly and Kenneth N. Townsend, MIT Press, 1993, p. 267). Obviously, if the economy is enveloped by a finite ecosystem there are limits to economic growth; when these limits are reached and costs of growth are greater than benefits, growth becomes “uneconomic.” But what about sustainable development? Daly thinks sustainable development is both possible and desirable. His argument is both subtle and clear, and it is worth taking some time to explore. I will do so in the next entry.

Herman E. Daly and Ecological Economics

2010-08-25T16:56:00.001-04:00

For the past year or so I’ve been thinking more and more about "ecology" and "economy," as two different and opposing pathways of thought regarding sustainability--and music. In an effort to bridge the gap between the two, a gap I’ve written about here previously, I’ve been reading some of the writings by economist Herman E. Daly, whose bona fides include six years working as an economist for the World Bank, as well as various professorships in the United States. Daly, who coined the term “uneconomic growth,” developed a kind of economics that he calls “ecological economics.” I’ve been interested to see if Daly’s view of economics can somehow reconcile ecology with economy and thereby provide a kind of sustainability thinking for cultural policy involved with music. But first, what is Daly about?

Throughout his writing, Daly issues a powerful indictment of contemporary mainstream economics, which he terms neo-classical economics (NCE), for the short-sighted and harmful assumption that technology will assure continued, indeed for practical purposes unlimited, economic growth and human prosperity. According to Daly, the growth and prosperity of capitalist democracies in twentieth-century Europe and North America, particularly in the US, enabled the triumph of NCE, which is based on the assumptions that continual economic growth, fueled by technological progress, will increase the prosperity of all nations. Third-world and fourth-world nations, by developing and modernizing along capitalist economic and democratic political lines, aided by Western experts and advances in agricultural technology, will become more productive and prosperous, lifting their populations out of poverty. Technological progress will insure that every succeeding generation, in every nation, has a higher standard of living and a better quality of life. As he puts it in his book Ecological Economics (2004), “Our strategy was to grow first, in the hope that a bigger pie would be easier to divide than a smaller one” (xxiii). Daly does not go deeply into the political aspects (he is not a politician) but it's now clear that in the last century — the “American century”— making the world safe for democracy also meant making it safe for capitalism and technological progress and, furthermore, making the world over partly in our own image.

In opposing unlimited growth, Daly joins the critique ushered in during the 1970s with the Club of Rome and, later, the Brundtland Report, much discussed earlier in this research blog. But his critique is more powerful in the sense that it is offered by a respected World Bank economist, and in that it is offered in economic terms. Specifically, he critiques with the economic concept of marginal utility, and claims that when the costs of growth outweigh the benefits, we have what he terms “uneconomic growth.” Global warming, aka climate change, is the prime example of costs outweighing benefits, but it is not the only example. As most of the examples, such as atmospheric pollution and an increase in human disease, involve the earth’s environment and its ecosystem, Daly’s ecological frame of reference, ecological economics, becomes particularly apt.

According to Daly, neo-classical economists assume(d) that growth could be unlimited and not adversely affect the earth’s ecosystem, or at least that the adverse effects would be inconsequential considering the size of the earth’s resources. Daly calls this “empty world” thinking; i.e., that economic transactions among humans have relatively little effect upon the world's ecosystem as a whole. On the contrary, environmental degradation caused by economic growth, with the predicted consequences of climate change, show that “full world” thinking is more appropriate, and that economic transactions, particularly those involving energy use, have a major impact upon the ecosystem.

Daly’s ecological economics, then, takes into account the environmental and ecological contexts of economic life. Whereas neoclassical economists either ignore the natural world or view it as economic resource, ecological economists understand the interconnectivity between the natural world and the economic world. In this way they approach not merely economics, but economics within nature’s economy. They understand human dependence upon the natural world in a way that neoclassical economists do not. "Economic man" exists within the natural world, not apart from it.

But is ecological economics a reconciliation of economic and ecological approaches to sustainability? Or is it meant to be a triumph of the ecological over the economic? We know how ecological economists stand in terms of natural capital; how do they stand on cultural capital? If some growth is uneconomic, other growth must be economic—that is, growth whose marginal utility is positive. Are they, then, in favor of “sustainable growth” or “smart growth?” Or do they view these terms as oxymorons? Where does Daly stand on this issue, and what are the implications for sustainability and music? In future blog entries I will explore these questions. For now, however, I acknowledge his major contribution to a re-thinking of economics, incorporating an ecological perspective. (In his notions of the “full world” there are, of course, parallels with earlier economists such as Malthus; and it would be worth exploring the climate of opinion that produced both Malthus and the field of folklore.) I also applaud his attempts to go beyond merely critiquing neoclassical economics from an ecological base, and instead to try to work out the science of ecological economics, which he has done in his writings and teaching.

Heritage and Colonialism Revisited

2010-07-28T16:44:00.001-04:00

In response to an earlier blog post, from January 18 of this year, "JS" asked "Whose version of 'genuine,' 'relevant,' and 'authentic' do you use? Whose taste, judgment and critical thinking is supported? How is the folklorist reconciled with the ethnomusicologist?"

The short answer is that heritage sites support heritage managers' tastes, judgments, and critical thinking. Such thinking is informed by a critical discourse surrounding the "genuine," the "relevant," and the "authentic," concepts that have been attacked (some would say destroyed) by critical theorists yet that continue to be defended by culture workers. Critical theorists today by and large take the position that such concepts are irrelevant and not helpful in understanding how cultures produce their subjects and objects. Heritage managers continue to use a version of these concepts based in traditional folklore and (to a lesser degree) ethnomusicology. Regina Bendix's book, In Search of Authenticity, is a history of folklore that is useful in this context.

The point I was making in the blog post is that ethnographic research and heritage management both appear as artifacts of the bureaucratic state, which is a handmaiden of colonialism. That is disturbing when the ideology of sustainability is meant to be enabling rather than stifling.

In recent months I've been turning to the writings of Herman Daly, an ecological economist; and to the concept of co-evolution, to see if they present a pathway out of this paradox.

Managing Catastrophe

2010-05-30T20:35:00.000-04:00

Now that the semester is over I'm returning to this research blog. The British Petroleum oil rig explosion, with millions of gallons of oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, has been much on my mind this past month. It's a catastrophe for the Gulf ecosystem. A human-made catastrophe. Play with fire and eventually you'll get burnt. Pride goes before a fall. The proverbial expressions are already in place for this spectacular instance of mismanagement, but damage will be so extensive that similar incidents of engineering gone amok such as Three Mile Island and Chernobyl don't compare in extent. But a more serious nuclear accident, not to mention a nuclear bomb, would. How far does this sort of thing have to go before people come to their senses and insist that government put an end to it?

Deep ecologists will take this as further evidence that human beings have no business engineering the natural world. Or trying to manage it. Yet attention to values will show there is a difference between engineering and managing for resource extraction and exploitation, such as oil drilling or mountaintop removal, which supports an unsustainable way of life; and the kinds of social engineering and management that aim at conservation.

In print

2010-03-12T19:14:00.000-05:00

The special issue of the journal The World of Music has just been published--the one on music and sustainability, with outstanding essays from scholars Tom Turino, Mark DeWitt, Lois Wilcken, Janet Topp-Fargion, and Tom Faux, along with my essay on an ecological approach to musical sustainability, and my editor's introduction to the entire volume. The wheels of publication turn slowly, but they do turn; now we shall wait to see what response is forthcoming.

In the meantime, a seminar during the current semester on music and cultural policy has helped inform me on what some others have been saying about these issues. I've refrained from commenting on the seminar here because, of course, the students know about this research blog, and I would prefer that they formulate their own ideas in response to the topic and weekly assignments. Still, it's plain that much of the discourse revolving around heritage and cultural tourism and engines of sustainability is based in economics; some is based in cultural studies. To date ecology has contributed only a little, by way of the concepts of biodiversity and conservation; my hope is that others will begin to think about how conservation works (and does not work) in ecology, and not simply borrow the concepts. For example, there is an interesting values-based critique of biodiversity that I hope will be the subject of a future post here.

Obviously, one of the things that fascinates me is the way these two discourses, economics and ecology, employ the concept of sustainability. I began to write about this in the paper for the American Folklore Society last fall--printed in its entirety in this blog a few months ago--and now I wish to explore it further. And so I've been reading not just in economics but in the field of ecological economics, to see what is out there.

America's Best Idea?

2010-02-13T10:34:00.000-05:00

News that an old colleague, Chuck Perdue, is near death prompted me to think about sustainability, conservation, and the US National Parks, the subject of a recent film series by the enormously popular documentarian Ken Burns, who calls the Parks "America's Best Idea." Not yet having seen this film series, I won't comment on it except to say that for the folks living back in the 1920s on the land that became the Shenandoah National Park in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, the Park wasn't America's best idea; it wasn't even a good one. The federal government forcibly removed and resettled the inhabitants to make way for the Park. Chuck and Nan Perdue's research into the Park removals overlapped with my research in the early 1980s on the families that lived in that region and who were the ancestors of the church congregation that became the core of my book, Powerhouse for God. I wanted to explore the relation between land and life, husbandry and religion, the ecology and human ecology of the region, and how lived traditions enter community life.

The mountain farmers did not leave their land willingly. Park supporters argued that their lifestyle, scratching out a subsistence living from scraggly mountain crops and from pigs running wild in the forest, was outdated and used the land badly. It was a poor adaptation, and the mountain poverty of the people was the result. They could be resettled in modern towns in clean, small houses with garden plots and indoor plumbing. Yet somehow those who were resettled in those modern circumstances felt claustrophobic and did not thrive. They longed for their unbound life in the mountains.

In the name of conservation, then, a Park was created chiefly for recreational purposes, to serve (as it was then argued) the population of Washington, DC who might travel to the Park for a weekend and come back to government work refreshed by experiencing the natural world. Of course, the Park had to be transformed back to Nature; it had been badly used, it was said, by the farmers. Today scarcely a trace beyond an old cellar hole remains. At Big Meadows, a natural clearing in the center of the Park, and a feature that was noted by travelers as early as the 1700s, stands an Interpretive Center, where the history of the land is told. When I last visited it fifteen years ago, there was no mention of the removals.

Today it is the mountaintops themselves that are being removed, for coal. Such removal is consistent with the ideology that Nature is a resource to be used. Wisely used, but used. This was the ideology that drove the Conservation Movement in the US during most of the 20th century; its champions were Theodore Roosevelt, and the Yale man Gifford Pinchot. Of course, along the way, compromises need to be made for the greater good. If a local population must be removed, or if its way of life must become as polluted as the mountain streams after the giant machines slice off the mountain tops, the damage is slight compared to the greater good that comes from the cheap energy of coal that heats the power plants that give us all so much electricity--and if they contribute to global warming, why, technology will give us "clean coal," whatever that may be, at some point before the planet warms beyond saving. So goes the rationalization and justification, but it rings hollow.

In my thinking about music and sustainability, I have wondered to what extent music should be regarded as a resource--a renewable human resource, of course, not a finite natural resource like coal. Does resource thinking about music inevitably put us on the same path as resource thinking regarding natural resources? When heritage and cultural tourism are the outcomes of musical and cultural conservation movements, must heritage organizations inevitably exploit resources? To what extent are people and cultures objectified in these constructions? How are those resources constructed and given value, and in what would their exploitation consist?

Ethnography, documentation, colonialism and sustainability

2010-01-18T23:09:00.001-05:00

When is heritage management in service of sustainability colonialist? Ethnographic research produces cultural knowledge which becomes the basis for heritage management in service to music's sustainability. So, for example, folk festivals are based in fieldwork documentation which is fit into theoretical models of folk, tradition, authenticity, and so forth, and the documentation surrounds the re-presentation of the folk artists in the festival setting, giving it the authority of the cultural specialist's gaze.

Documentation of music in its cultural setting (not far removed from "collecting") requires such skills as detail-orientation, the ability to organize and then to classify, discriminatory ability (genuine rather than spurious, relevant rather than irrelevant, authentic instead of inauthentic), taste, judgment, "critical thinking," people skills, and technology skills. Unsettlingly, but not surprisingly, these are the same skills needed for heritage management; indeed, for bureaucratic management generally. Unsettlingly, insofar as the bureaucratic state based on ethnographic information creates the conditions of colonialism; and if management by cultural heritage workers is akin to colonialism, what is sustained is not a musical culture but a colony.

Documenting the Documentarian

2009-12-23T10:54:00.001-05:00

I’d been thinking over whether to become a consultant on a film project, a documentary film about a folk music collector. It struck me as interesting that a film should be made to document someone whose work was documenting others’ music. Documenting the documentarian! One can imagine the production film made of the making of this film as well: three tiers for documentation!

Of course, documenting and then archiving in a private collection, public archives or museum has proved one of the time-honored ways of sustaining music sound, even though the goal was not preservation for sustainability but rather comphrension through classification, analysis, and comparison with other specimens. The re-patriation of sound documents from the 19th century is one of the cultural partnership success stories of the last couple of decades.

Serendipitously, Monday's morning radio news brought with it two more instances of document, which got me thinking about what a document may mean today. The first was an appreciative review of Bach’s cello sonatas, the story line featuring Pablo Casals’ discovery of the score in Barcelona in 1898. “Without the discovery of this document, Casals would never have been able to practice the music for twelve years and then bring Bach’s masterpiece to the world's attention,” the radio host said, while Casals’ 1939 recordings played in the background.

The second instance: the president of Iran, Mamoud Ahmadinejad, was confronted by ABC news interviewer Diane Sawyer with a document allegedly showing that his nation’s scientists were building a “trigger” for a nuclear weapon. Ahmadinejad refused to look at Sawyer's copy of the document, waving it away. "No, I don't want to see this kind of document," he said. "These are some fabricated papers issued by the American government." [See http://abcnews.go.com/WN/diane-sawyers-exclusive-interview-mahmoud-ahmadinejad/story?id=9383487].

This was a special “moment of truth”: there was a document, presumably proving something, and the political official refused to acknowledge it—refused even to look at it, as if the act of examining it would have lent it a certain credibility. What strange powers a document is granted! Document, forgery, "see for yourself"—our Western culture habitually imbues a document with truth-power. In the postmodern age, the document is a special case of truth-claim. What is it?

Bess Lomax Hawes

2009-11-29T13:22:00.000-05:00

Bess Lomax Hawes, daughter of John Lomax and brother of Alan Lomax, passed away two days ago. She was a pioneer in American efforts at cultural sustainability. Many younger public folklorists may not realize that as director of NEA-Folk Arts, Bess Hawes was the driving force in establishing the network of state folklorists in the US, chiefly attached to state arts councils since the late 1970s. Shortly after I joined the Folk Arts panel in 1980, Bess began asking me why there wasn't a position for a state folklorist in Massachusetts. It wasn't long before Jane Beck and I were lobbying at the state arts council, telling them that the NEA would fund a position for a state folk arts coordinator for three years, and that when the arts council saw how valuable it would be to have one, they would surely pick up the funding from then on. The head of the arts council agreed, and why not? An added position, free for three years, with no obligations (or so she thought). Brilliant. And that is how the position that Maggie Holtzberg has now, with the Mass. Cultural Council, originated. The pattern had been established before Massachusetts, and it was repeated in state after state.

Besides this critical infrastructure work, without which public folklore in the US would have had a much diminished presence in the last 40 years, under Bess's direction NEA-Folk Arts pioneered in the efforts to aid communities develop and maintain their expressive culture (what UNESCO today terms intangible cultural heritage), giving grants totalling nearly $3 million annually during the 1980s. The current major efforts by UNESCO and WIPO to "safeguard traditional culture" can be seen as emanating in part from the pioneering US public folklore efforts of Bess Hawes--along with others such as her brother Alan, Archie Green (who also died this year), Ralph Rinzler, Joe Wilson, and Alan Jabbour who, if I'm not mistaken, preceded her as the director of NEA-Folk Arts before he left to become the director of the newly formed American Folklife Center. Unlike her brother Alan, she didn't seek the spotlight but worked behind the scenes to bring scores of folklorists and, later, ethnomusicologists in or out of the academy into the public arena. At the NEA she exercised her considerable charisma and was remarkably effective in bringing and keeping folk arts at the table. She was a steward over American folklife and her numerous "children" (public folklore workers for two decades and beyond). Her efforts, and those of Joe Wilson, angered some musical revivalists who felt that NEA-Folk Arts, and the NCTA, and the Smithsonian, exercised purist notions of authenticity in determining who should, and who should not, be recognized and funded as folk artists. To some, these purist notions are anachronistic in a postmodern world of diasporas, blurred genres, multiple identities, interpretive communities, and contested authenticities. To others, they remain a worthy ideal.

I'm sure that many of us who sat on the NEA-Folk Arts panels, or worked as public folklorists and ethnomusicologists over the years, have "Bess stories." One of the best known is the US map she kept in her office, showing every state. Whenever a folklorist got a job in one of those states, a colored push pin went into the location. She used to point to the map with great pride as the number of pins, and states, and public folklorists, increased. It was as if this gentle lady was mapping an occupying army moving into positions around the country. Another story has to do with her weight which followed her family's genetic pattern and increased over the years, causing her some consternation. I recall seeing her after she returned from a visit to one of the Pacific islands where with Folk Arts grant money a fine documentary cassette tape had been produced. She was very pleased to make it known to us that she had been honored as a "big" woman. At panel meetings she managed to keep mum and let the panelists discuss whether to fund the grant proposals, but it was obvious each time that she had a few personal favorites and also a few that she thought beyond the pale. Occasionally one of the panelists would champion a proposal that Bess thought was impossibly problematic, and if it appeared that other panelists were beginning to jump the tracks and head off in the same direction, Bess still wouldn't say a word, but she'd tilt her head and roll her eyes; and panelists would notice and--usually--go back on the rails. Most impressive, to me, was the person behind it all: the dignity of a grandmother; always working like a mother for her many children (her natural children and then her adopted ones--public folklorists and even a few ethnomusicologists); and inside, the high spirited, graceful young lady she had been--and still was. She had a great gift of making the path through the dark and thorny forest seem obvious, inevitable, and right--and fun.

Music, Sustainability, and Cultural Policy: China Lecture 3 Summary

2009-11-21T20:00:00.001-05:00

In this lecture I discussed ways in which government and non-government agencies may apply lessons learned from sustainability thinking to public policy initiatives aimed at conserving and/or developing musical cultures and music. I examined two music cultures--the blues musical culture, and the musical culture of the Old Regular Baptists (a religious group)--in light of cultural policies and sustainability. In the blues music culture, governmental and non-governmental institutions have intervened to sustain different visions of blues music, and the result is tension over issues such as authenticity and aesthetics. In the music culture of the Old Regular Baptists, a combination of far-sighted community leaders and a small number of scholars have partnered with governmental and non-governmental institutions to institute cultural policies that seem to be working to help strengthen these musical cultures. Ironically, because this is a religious musical culture, there is less outside interest in intervention and more internal interest in preservation; the result is that with more direction from within, the musical culture has been better sustained.

Sustainability and Music Education: China Lecture 2 Summary

2009-11-21T19:53:00.001-05:00

In this lecture I considered education as a means of sustaining music. For the ethnomusicologist, music education is but one means societies use in order to transmit music and musical skills from one generation to the next. However, music education also involves, implicitly, ideas about what music is (and is not), what music is good, where music comes from, and what is the purpose or function of music. I reviewed the development of public and private music education in the United States, and also discussed the place of folk and world music in it.

The most basic means of sustaining music from one generation to the next is by either informal or formal teaching and learning. Different social groups transmit their music through different kinds of education. Within any large social group many kinds of music education take place. What can an ethnomusicologist contribute to the discussion of sustainability and music education? Historically music education in the United States, as elsewhere, shows differences and sometimes philosophical disagreement in three areas. The first area of difference involves the distinction between formal instruction with lessons and written musical notation in the schools versus informal learning that takes place in a family or neighborhood setting by imitation and oral tradition, usually without lessons and almost never with notation.

The second area of disagreement, which takes place in colleges, universities, and conservatories, is the balance in the curriculum and the structure of the musical institution between, first, practical instruction in performing music; second, theoretical knowledge in the history of music and how music is designed and structured; and third, courses in music education below the university level (i.e., how to teach music to children aged 5-18).

The third area, which takes place at all levels of formal learning, whether in elementary schools, junior high schools, high schools, colleges, universities, and conservatories, is the balance in the curriculum and the institution between Western art music and multicultural music, including folk music and world music. The United States sees itself as a multicultural nation but until fairly recently the dominant view among American scholars and the general public was that the United States was a united group of people who had melted their ethnicities in a large pot into a single culture with a single language (English) and a single set of values: one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. But in the last fifty years this view has been strongly challenged by American scholars who view the United States as various groups of people struggling with different languages, histories, ethnicities, and ways of life towards the ideals of liberty and justice that have not been achieved for all, and that when they are achieved each group will retain its ethnic, religious, linguistic, and musical cultures. This second view is the view held by most ethnomusicologists: it is a vision of integration without loss of identity in which world music appears as a powerful symbol of peace, justice, and conflict resolution among peoples within a nation and among nations in the world.

Sustainability and Music: China Lecture 1 Summary

2009-11-21T19:46:00.001-05:00

In China I gave a series of three lectures on music and sustainability. In the first lecture I considered the advantages of bringing sustainability theory to bear on our thinking about people making music. Sustainability theory and practice in the West originated with the conservation and environmental movements, but in the last few decades it has moved into the economic realm. Thinking about music as a commodity means considering it from the standpoint of economic sustainability, property rights, and copyright law. Thinking about music ecologically means thinking of music as heritage and musical cultures as ecosystems in which people act as stewards or trustees caring for music in the present and planning for music in the future. Here is a summary of the first lecture. Most of these ideas will be familiar to readers of this blog.

Something which is sustainable is something that can continue indefinitely. A process such as agriculture, or commerce, or energy use, is considered sustainable when it meets the needs of the present without compromising the needs of the future. Typically we think about sustainability when something appears endangered, like animals that have been hunted near to extinction, or the planet itself due to climate change. Anthropologists think in terms of the sustainability of traditional ways of life among native populations. At first glance it does not appear that music is endangered. People will likely make music until mankind itself becomes extinct. Yet when we consider that certain musics and musical cultures have become extinct, we realize that it is not music as a human resource that is endangered, but rather it is particular musical cultures and practices, which contribute to the diversity of the world’s musical resources that are endangered. It is to these musical cultures that sustainability applies.

Considering sustainability in its broadest context, ethnomusicologists have tried to sustain musical cultures in three ways. First, music and ethnographic data are recorded and placed in archives. This “salvage ethnomusicology” does not sustain the musical cultures but instead preserves the music as a dried flower is pressed between the pages of a book or a butterfly is pinned to a mount in a glass case. Second, ethnomusicologists have attempted to sustain musical cultures by displaying them at heritage sites, hoping that this will raise cultural pride and encourage the people to continue making music. However, what usually has happened is that the musical cultures construct a particular repertoire and style for the tourists at these heritage sites, often in response to the ethnomusicologists’ requirements of tradition and authenticity. Third, and most recently, ethnomusicologists have partnered with governmental and non-governmental agencies (NGOs) and with community leaders to try to sustain the musical cultures directly in their home communities, working together to discover common goals and methods. Often this means that ethnomusicologists need to look anew at the processes of innovation and change and their effect on tradition, so that while we can and should help the musical cultures to understand their histories and traditions, we do not assume that musical preservation means that the music must remain the same, as that would be a death sentence. Instead, a partnership in conservation rather than preservation has been the goal. For this, the term sustainability is better suited than the terms preservation or conservation. As an idea, sustainability has been around for a long time, but it was only in the 1980s that the word caught the attention of public policy makers.

The sustainability discourse thus far takes place chiefly in terms of resources involving ecology and economy. And so the rhetoric of sustainability has been employed by applied ethnomusicologists to promote and justify conserving endangered musics, an example of what UNESCO calls “intangible cultural heritage.” As a result, traditional music usually goes on display for cultural tourists, and the income generated is meant to sustain the local economy and the musical culture. Sometimes, though, identifying particular musics as masterpieces deserving safeguarding results in unintended negative consequences within the music culture itself, such as political conflicts over tradition versus innovation, or the development of a special show or display repertoire for tourists. I will discuss the effects of UNESCO's designating the Royal Ballet of Cambodia a masterpiece of intangible cultural heritage in this context. It seems to me that the display of heritage for cultural tourism is less likely to result in musical sustainability than partnerships between ethnomusicologists and local musical cultures to conserve music within those local communities directly.

Sustainable Music in China

2009-11-15T23:13:00.006-05:00

As I wrote earlier, I was invited to China, to deliver a series of lectures on music and sustainability, at the Central Conservatory of Music, in Beijing. I was there from Oct. 31 through Nov. 9, delivered three lectures (I will post summaries shortly), and had a chance to learn from Chinese colleagues something of the Chinese view on music and sustainability. Indeed, this is something they have thought about and done something about.

Perhaps one of the reasons the Chinese have implemented a cultural policy meant to preserve traditional music is that since the Chinese Revolution (1949) and particularly during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) traditional expressive culture was under threat from the government itself. One of the foci of the Cultural Revolution was the abolition of the "four olds": old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. Another possible reason is that in the reaction against the Cultural Revolution, tradition was revalued; certain musical traditions like that associated with the guqin (ku-chin) zither, an ancient music known since the time of Confucius, were singled out by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage. Unlike the US, China has signed the UNESCO treaty on ICH, so it has even more reason to endorse it.

To show me an example of Chinese cultural policy meant to preserve the heritage of traditional music, I was taken to Qujiaying village, where I witnessed a concert performance by the village music society. This is the full orchestra, consisting of percussion (drum and cymbals) and winds (reeded end-blown flutes, transverse flutes, and sheng (a traditional Chinese mouth organ; note the vertical tubes):

The tour group included our host, a group of visiting performers and scholars from New Zealand, some students from the Conservatory, and myself. Qujiaying music dates back to the late Yuan dynasty. It originated in Buddhist funeral ceremonies. According to the official literature that we were given, "experts [from the Chinese Art Academy] think Qujiaying classical music is of great artistic and precious cultural value. It enjoys the reputation of the living fossil and the Treasure of the Chinese Culture."

This is the Qujiaying village percussion ensemble (a subset of the orchestra) in concert. The music performed, I was told, was ancient and originally played at village funerals, and still is. Interestingly, there is a notation; and in the museum we saw some very old examples. The musicians do not play from notation, though. After visits from prominent international music scholars, beginning in 1986, to this village and its music, the Chinese government began to pay attention to their' accolades. They designated the music as Chinese national heritage and poured $2 million dollars into the village. A museum and a concert hall (temple) were built. Now the music is performed for visitors in the temple, as it was for us. There is plenty of money to secure a continuing supply of instruments. Master village musicians teach a younger generation. The continuation of the music is assured. In 2000, it was awarded the first prize in the contest to celebrate China's 50th national birthday. In 2006 it was listed in the Catalogue of World Cultural and Natural Heritage.

Indeed, the music was wonderful. To hear an excerpt, click on the arrow in the picture just above. With the full orchestra, much was played in a free rhythm, with the winds in heterophonic unison. With the percussion ensemble, there was a definite pulse beat, and much repetition, and syncopation, leading to trance.

Our trip to and from Qujiaying village involved a police escort along the 2-lane highway, a patrol car with siren blaring, clearing a way for our bus to pass between the cars, trucks, motorcycles, bicycles, and pedestrians. After the concert we had a delicious late lunch, with the governor of the district and, I was told, various Party officials. No visiting ethnomusicologist would ever have been treated like this in North America!

After we returned from the village, I heard some discussion of the music in terms of heritage. I had lectured only the day before on some of the problems with cultural tourism, and here I was--a cultural tourist experiencing musical heritage in China. Was the music the same in concert as at a funeral? Not precisely; some was strung together in a kind of "suite." It is compared, in the official literature, with Western music: "it includes 13 divertimentos. . . and the melody of the four season. It also has seven concerto grossos." I assume these comparisons are meant to enhance its prestige as a classical music, but in my view the music does not profit from this kind of uplift. I heard, also, some questions about exactly where the $2 million went. It looked to me as if the buildings would have taken it all, buildings plus instruments plus costumes and salaries for the musicians; but there were those who wondered whether some of the village businessmen had also gotten some of it. But on the whole if there was criticism, it was muted. I noted that there were no CDs of Qujiaying music for sale. No admissions charge. No commodification of the music at all. A handsomely produced booklet with many color photos and some text (including a page in English) was given to the visitors.

Many village officials were there during the concert. Some began talking loudly and their voices could be heard in the soft passages. It occurred to me that at funerals this conversation would have taken place. For them, the music might not have been remarkable. But in the concert setting, it interfered with the visitors' experience of the music. A few visitors scowled. Perhaps someone said something to one of the hosts. Then one or two of the hosts went to the back of the hall and hushed them.

As our visit came to a close, I sought out the head of the village music society and thanked him. His picture is at the left. He was too old, I imagined, to perform with the group; but I surmised that at one time he'd been a master musician. Now he led us on the museum tour and described the instruments. In the museum old instruments were in glass cases, labeled. On the walls were pictures, including photos of some of the visiting scholars who had come to the village since 1986. Many--most--of the people there had digital cameras and were using them often. I was told that some day our pictures might appear on the wall.

An Ecological Approach to Cultural Sustainability, pt. 2

2009-10-29T18:05:00.002-04:00

My first case study involves the folk culture that has grown up around fishing off the coast of East Penobscot Bay, Maine. Here the relation to the natural world is obvious, as fish are responsible for the culture’s livelihood. Not many years ago the groundfish diminished greatly in number, the result of overfishing. The fishing grounds are a commons, and the fishermen acted out its tragedy, with ever larger boats and larger catches. As my fishing friend Hap Collins said, “You can blow up a balloon only so big before it bursts.” Here as elsewhere in the Atlantic fishery the principle of limits to growth could not be more starkly demonstrated. More recently, with the global economic downturn, the price of lobster has plummeted, leaving many fishermen “underwater,” with their catch no longer paying the mortgage on their equipment. In response, the heavy hand of state and federal government has intervened to limit the catch and number of days that a fisherman can be on the water. This conservation method is meant to relieve the pressure on the fish so they can re-populate, but it also increases the pressure on the fishing culture, as now no one can make a living with short days. Ted Ames, a local fisherman, developed a different solution. He thought if he could find out where the fish spawning grounds were, then instead of limiting days on the water the spawning grounds could be declared off limits. Instead of trying to conduct a scientific survey, he went to the old-timers who had fished years ago and got oral histories about those places where all the young fish seemed to come from. The locations of the spawning habitat turned out to be relatively consistent down through the years. And so Ames has proposed, with some success, certain off-limits zones instead of short days. Ames’s oral histories are now safely archived at the Maine Folklife Center, by the way. If his idea proves successful, the folk culture of fishing off East Penobscot Bay may become viable once more. We folklorists who display the songs and crafts of this culture, who prize the stories that the crab-pickers tell one another, would do well to understand their interdependent relation to the local economy and the natural world, the importance of diversity in the fishery (not only groundfish but also lobsters, clams, and scallops, as well as seaweeds, sea urchins, and other wonders of the deep and not so deep), the lesson of unlimited growth, and the stewardship role that the fishermen are taking on by acting in their collective interest and avoiding the spawning grounds.

My second case study involves the folk culture of the Old Regular Baptists, a religious group known for their lined-out hymnody, who live in the mountains and river valleys of the Blue Ridge in central Appalachia, a natural ecosystem of great diversity in those areas that have not been destroyed by logging and mining. Those I know best live in southeastern Kentucky, and I will admit that I have been involved in presentation and display of their music, with cassettes and then CDs published on Folkways (though distributed mostly to Old Regular Baptists, at cost), and by presenting them festival appearances. But however satisfied they, and I, are to know that their music is undergoing renewal, the fact is that their folk culture remains fragile for a number of reasons: the small size of their population, the concentration in a relatively small geographic area, the dependence on old-fashioned religious beliefs and practices which do not appeal to the young, the difficulty in performing their expressive culture, whether the hymnody or the sung prayers or preaching, and most important, the economic dependence of the population on coal mining. It is chiefly a lack of diversity that appears to be the problem here, but it is not one that is easily solved. Indeed, one might argue that it is not a problem at all, but rather an intensifier of the folk culture as it acts to preserve itself in the face of adversity.

In the early 1990s I partnered with this group to help them transmit their music from one generation to the next, in response to a request from their leader; and I was able to get them a grant to support musical self-documentation so that they could record some of their endangered melodies—in this case, not only the hymn melodies but even more important, the lining tunes. However, their attachment to the natural world (God’s creation) in that particular place, is very strong, as is their attachment to that soundscape and their identification of it with that natural landscape. They often speak of them both—soundscape and landscape—as expressions of God that have a peculiar “drawing power” for them. If they move away as young adults to find better-paying work, they return to the home place late in middle age and join the churches of their foreparents. But many do not move away: they work in the mines. Or used to: today strip mining and mountaintop removal have introduced new efficiencies and thrown a lot of miners out of work. If five hundred workers are needed in an underground mine, only ninety workers are needed to effect mountaintop removal mining.

Of course, there is more to the biocultural relation between Old Regular Baptists and mountaintop removal than unemployment. Mountaintop removal is a most horrific form of ecological disturbance, as the first step removes all vegetation and topsoil, not only leaving the landscape unable to protect the nearby towns from flooding in heavy rains, but also killing off the rare and endangered species that characterize the diverse mountain ecology. After the mining process is done the land is reclaimed by returning topsoil and reseeding for vegetation, but the average length of time in which the landscape remains an open wound is ten years. I am not satisfied to have focused my cultural conservation efforts so narrowly upon the expressive culture of lined-out hymnody. Yes, I believe it is a cultural treasure—as they do, although it is even more important for them as a spiritual communion—but in continuing my work in the community I intend to pursue economic subjects as well. In truth many of them are ambivalent about mountaintop removal, as mining remains an important source of income. I have listened to them talk about this for some time; now I need to listen harder and see if I can understand where they are coming from, so as to learn where they may be wanting to go.

With the folk culture of the Old Regular Baptists, diversity plays an ambiguous role. They are not diverse but, paradoxically, this may intensify their cultural traditions. Indeed, in the last few decades some ecologists have questioned the adaptive value of diversity in certain cases. Tropical rain forests are very diverse but also very fragile. Certain ecosystems that have a dominant species such as a particular kind of grass, and which are not diverse, nevertheless seem relatively persistent and stable. The interconnectedness of the expressive culture to the landscape and soundscape is explicit and strong. Dependence on mining has been problematic over the course of the last hundred years, and appears to be even more so now, as mountaintop removal pushes the limits of growth to an extreme that threatens the entire biocultural community. Stewardship emerges in this community among their leaders, particularly the head of the Association of churches, Elwood Cornett, a thoughtful and intelligent community scholar who has led a musical and cultural renewal among them for the past twenty years or so, to the point where their church membership has increased steadily and the health of the religious folk culture appears far stronger than it was when I first began visiting them nearly twenty years ago.

To conclude, then, ecology and economy require marriage counseling, but there is no divorcing them: they too are interconnected. In fact they come from the same Greek root, oikos, meaning household. The early ecologists brought economy and ecology together when they spoke of “Nature’s economy,” by which they meant learning from Nature: an economics of sustainability that follows the path of the natural world: diverse, interconnected, appropriate in size, and looked after by humans who consider themselves caretakers, or stewards, not owners. Our efforts at cultural conservation result in better best practices when we think of sustainability in these terms rather than in the terms of the economists. Following this construction of nature we emphasize stewardship, not ownership; performance and community, not product and commodity; human rights, not property rights; and not only human rights but the rights of all living creatures. An ecology or an economy dependent on continuous growth must fail. This is what Emerson meant in his poem “Hamatreya” when he wrote the Earth Song. Here the earth speaks:

       The lawyer's deed 
Ran sure 
In tail 
To them and to their heirs 
Who shall succeed 
Without fail 
For evermore.
  
Here is the land, 
Shaggy with wood, 
With its old valley, 
Mound, and flood.— 
But the heritors— 
Fled like the flood's foam; 
The lawyer, and the laws, 
And the kingdom, 
Clean swept herefrom.
They called me theirs, 
Who so controlled me;
      Yet every one 
Wished to stay,
and is gone. 
How am I theirs, 
If they cannot hold me, 
But I hold them?

[And now the poet speaks:]
  When I heard the Earth-song, 
I was no longer brave; 
My avarice cooled 
Like lust in the chill of the grave.

An Ecological Approach to Cultural Sustainability, pt. 1

2009-10-29T17:47:00.006-04:00

I've neglected this blog for a couple of months on account of preparing for the new semester and then teaching. But music, culture, and sustainability have not been idle. I reproduce below a paper that I read in front of the annual conference of the American Folklore Society, on Oct. 24, only a few days ago. In a couple of days I fly to Beijing to deliver some invited lectures on music and sustainability to the musicology department of the Central Conservatory of Music. I'll have more to say about this trip as it goes. But now, here is a copy of my AFS paper:

[Paper delivered at the 2009 conference of the American Folklore Society, Boise, ID]

For several years I’ve been trying to think through ways that the discourse on sustainability might be brought helpfully to bear for folklorists and ethnomusicologists working in cultural conservation. Sustainability, if we think about it for a moment, operates chiefly in two realms: the environment and the economy. Of course, the two are closely linked, but there is a good deal of tension between those who are working to sustain the biosphere and those whose goal is sustainable economic development. Today, when even Monsanto claims to be all about sustainable agriculture, and when we have Wall Street bailouts while the U.S. unemployment rate is ten percent and rising, we can ask the question who and what is to be sustained.

Some of us interested in cultural conservation, or in safeguarding intangible cultural heritage as UNESCO has phrased it, have struggled with this tension between conservation and commerce. We promote cultural tourism at heritage sites, while our non-profit cultural conservation organizations engage in strategic planning and adopt a business mentality in order to thrive in the world of commerce. Some of us are uneasy with this business model in which folk cultures are displayed at festivals, in museums, interpretive centers, heritage sites, and so forth, and tourists are both educated and treated as consumers who walk away with product from the gift shops: CDs, folk art objects, that sort of thing. Advanced consumerism leads to connoisseurship and collections; some of the finest collections are bought by museums, which can be seen as model cultural consumers. We have faith that cultural tourism raises consciousness and promotes cultural conservation and renewal. As the Old Regular Baptists say of their faith, we have a “lively hope.” But some of us who decry global corporate capitalism remain uneasy with this tension between cultural conservation and commerce. Let’s explore some sources of that tension briefly now by contrasting the way sustainability works in the two worlds of ecology and economy.

Conservation ecologists target endangered species; they intervene through conservation to protect and sustain populations. Economists target resources; they intervene through development to manage sustainable economic growth. Conservation ecologists value diversity; economists value efficiency. Both are engaged in policy-making, but conservation ecologists proceed from the principle of human co-existence with the natural world, whereas economists consider the natural world in terms of resources for human welfare. Economists are driven to think of their world in terms of property, commodities and exchange, whereas conservation ecologists are filled with wonder and consider the natural world a gift. We could say that economists look forward to a world of prosperity while ecologists hope for a world of equilibrium with its connotations of justice and equity.

At the moment, the cultural conservation model that public folklorists employ tilts in the direction of the economists. The latest issue of NEA Arts arrived on my doorstep a few days ago, with its lead article entitled “The Business of Culture.” But what would it mean to tilt in the direction of conservation ecology instead? What would it mean for us in our cultural conservation efforts to follow nature’s economy? Nature’s economy values diversity for adaptation, and puts natural limits on growth as ecosystems move toward equilibrium; nature’s economy is built on the principle of interconnectedness, that everything in the ecosystem is connected to everything else, and that, to take a most famous example, the so-called butterfly effect, the flap of a butterfly’s wings in a park in China can transform the storm systems the following month over a city in North America. In addition to the principles of diversity, limits to growth, and interconnectedness, we add to nature’s economy the human equation of stewardship, or good caretaking, as a trustee acts in the interest of the trust, not him or herself. These four principles form the core of what we might learn by following nature’s economy.

I am returning in my recent work to an older way of thinking; twenty-five years ago in the first edition of Worlds of Music I asked readers to consider musical cultures as analogous to ecosystems, interconnected, with diversity advantageous for sustainable adaptation. Just as conservation ecologists look beyond targeted species to whole ecosystems, so those of us interested in cultural sustainability must look beyond expressive culture to the social, political, and most important, the economic aspects of the folk cultures we hope to help sustain. As the organic gardeners say, for the health of the plant look to the health of the soil. And beyond those aspects we must look at the ways in which these folk cultures interact with and are impacted by changes in the natural environment, as many of those we prize have been and are being marginalized by changes in the natural environment driven by economic desires, sometimes purely exploitative, sometimes exploitation cloaked in greenwash, and sometimes offered for sustainable development. When we put these expressive cultures on display we are offering little more than life support if we do not also work with the people in their communities, not only to conserve the expressive aspects of folk cultures, but also to confront the social, political, and economic props that keep these folk cultures going well or going badly. I turn now to two case studies illustrating these principles of nature’s economy in the world of cultural conservation. [continued in next entry]

Sandy Ives and the Maine Folklife Center

2009-08-03T21:09:00.002-04:00

[The following, with a few minor alterations, was posted to PUBLORE this evening, the public sector folklorists' listserve.]

Sandy Ives was a great inspiration to so many and his loss is painful. Let me add my voice to the chorus and say that as his friend and colleague for more than thirty-five years I will miss him terribly. It was only a few weeks ago that I visited Sandy and Bobby at their home in Orono, and Sandy and I talked for two hours. It seemed like only five minutes. His mind was fine, his conversation even better. He was aware of the troubles that the dean of the college of arts and sciences was visiting on one of his legacies, the Maine Folklife Center, but we didn't talk about that. We talked as we always did about folklore, poetry, fieldwork, teaching, writing, music, people and tennis; and we discovered as we always did, time after time, that we had yet another favorite thing in common--this time it was Ezra Pound's ABC of Reading, and he took me right to it on his shelf. Afterwards I spoke with his wife Bobbie and she told me how much he'd enjoyed the visit. I tried to tell her how much I'd enjoyed it, too, but enjoyed is only a roundabout way here of talking about what we were doing, affirming friendship in the face of death. I know he had many more visits from friends in his last days and I'm sure it was the same.

As a part-time resident of the state of Maine for thirty years now, I've watched the Northeast Archives grow into the Maine Folklife Center, in some ways as the Archive of Folk Song grew into the American Folklife Center, combining a newer public folklore component with its ongoing archival holdings. For most of that time I've been on the Maine Folklife Center's advisory board; Sandy set it up to advise him as director, because it was clear to him that it was going to move in the direction of public folklore, while he himself was not--he would concentrate on his research and writing projects. Of course, Sandy had been one of the first folklorists to sit on the NEA Folk Arts Panel, and he knew and understood what public folklore was going to become, and he supported it; he just didn't want to spend his time directing a center, and so he found university money to hire a part-time associate director to run the show, and set up an advisory board to help with suggestions.

In the last twenty or so years what had once been a volunteer operation--the archives--grew into a Center with a faculty Director, an associate director, an archivist, and an administrative assistant. When Sandy retired and his successor was (wrongfully) denied tenure and the faculty position lost in a previous budget crisis by the anthropology department, the Center became vulnerable. A few short years later and in the current budget tsunami, what had grown to four positions attached to a thriving Center when Sandy retired have become one position (the director) who is now under orders to raise soft money or in another year the Center will have to close and the archives will be transferred to the library, although at what level of care is uncertain.

It was only a couple of weeks ago that the dean of the college of liberal arts and sciences, who was responsible for the budget cuts to the MFC staff positions in the first place, took the director (Pauleena MacDougall) along with advisory board members David Taylor and me around to meet the deans of research and of lifelong learning, in hopes that they might be better able to house and fund the MFC. We got no more commitment from them than from the dean of the college. As I understood it, the units in those divisions already were supported chiefly by soft money. The dean of the college had two weeks earlier told our advisory board that he had devised criteria for budget cutting: teaching, research, and service, in that order. He was surprised at the end of his application of those criteria that the MFC came out so badly. He considers the MFC primarily a service operation, apparently overlooking its research function (fifty years and nearly fifty volumes of the Northeast Folklore monograph publications series apparently does not count much, nor does the public folklore research that the MFC has been carrying out, nor do the current director's publications, which would be the envy of most assistant professors) and unaware of the irony that when the university eliminated the regular faculty position for a folklorist, it cut the teaching component back to a few folklore courses offered by adjuncts, chiefly as distance learning over the internet. It's a little as if you cut out someone's tongue and then ask them why they're having trouble speaking.

And so the bottom line is that the Center cannot continue to expect to receive staff salary funds from the University of Maine. If it is to survive there, it will have to do so on grants and donations. That is why those of us interested in its survival need to mobilize support. Grants, gifts, anything and everything. The advisory board has been working with Pauleena for weeks now on a letter to be sent to the AFS membership list; it should be in the mail shortly, with suggestions about whom to write, whom to call, and of course how to donate if you care to. Other fundraising efforts are underway, grant proposals, appeals to the Stephen and Tabitha King foundation, and so forth, but the Center needs a great deal more help if it is to survive. UMaine has had a fifty-year legacy of folklife study, teaching, and research, is the leading institution in folklore in northern New England, and is missing an opportunity to build on excellence. My university, Brown, as most universities do, build in those areas where we are already strong; squandering such an opportunity completely by eliminating the faculty position for a folklorist and then eviscerating the Maine Folklife Center on the grounds that it does not well serve the chief mission of the university--teaching--is mypoic at best.

Let me add one more thing. When the staff cuts were made known a few months ago I'd hoped that a concerted campaign with some influential Maine state legislators could put pressure to bear on the university to fund the MFC. I'd even hoped that there might be line items in the legislature's funding of the university system so that certain funds could be earmarked for the MFC. But we were told that there is no way for the state legislature to earmark funds for particular part of the university system; the university gets a lump sum and it is the university that decides how to spend it. The best thing that could be done, I think, is a grass-roots campaign that gets something like a bill written in the Maine state legislature as it was for the American Folklife Center. We need another Archie Green for this. In the meantime, individual state legislators can be reached to talk up the Center. It turns out that the representative for the university's district in Orono, Emily Kane, is the niece of the dean of the college who made the decision to cut the center staff down to one (and that one only for one more year), and who led Pauleena, David and me around to the deans of research and of lifelong learning in hopes of finding a home for the MFC there. After those meetings, he had us meet with the university librarian and the head of special collections and we discussed the situation with the archives, which are part of the MFC and not now a part of the university library. The librarian understood the importance of the archives, as did the head of special collections; but they noted that without additional funding from the university they would not be able to do much more than house the collection and provide access. To conserve and digitize the collection, to grow it as a living, working collection--this would require additional funding. The dean of the college asked Pauleena and the head of special collections to work on a budget and submit it to him. It remains to be seen where the funding will come from.

Sandy Ives and Mike Seeger

2009-08-03T11:00:00.006-04:00

I've been thinking about Sandy Ives and Mike Seeger in tandem for the past couple of weeks. Both folkorists were in hospice care, waiting for the end; Sandy died Saturday and Mike's time isn't long. Each was attracted to folk music early on, and both recorded albums for Folkways in the 1950s. But since then their paths diverged.

Mike had a career as a musician, solo and with the New Lost City Ramblers, and as an independent folklorist who located, interviewed, learned music from, and in many cases produced record albums of traditional musicians who at one time had made commercial recordings: Maybelle Carter, Dock Boggs, Eck Robertson, and others, including Lesley Riddle who did not record commercially but who gave his songs to A.P. Carter of The Carter Family. Mike is a half-brother to folksinger Pete Seeger and a son of the musicologist Charles Seeger; therefore an uncle to the ethnomusicologist Tony Seeger. His path was different from theirs as well, one that took the music that he found into himself, and that resulted in performances to the general public, whether the concerts of the New Lost City Ramblers, or the lecture-demonstrations such as the one he gave at my university a year and a half ago to help our string band celebrate its twentieth anniversary. Toward the end of his life he made a number of instructional videotapes in which he passed on his knowledge of traditional guitar and banjo playing, which was more than just skills and techniques: it was an approach to understanding the history of this music and its complex cultural background, particularly the interchange among Black and white musicians that resulted in what we now call "old-time music" and identify chiefly with the roots music of the upland South from the minstrel era to about World War II.

Mike was, above all, an interpreter of this music. He didn't write very much; writing must not have been nearly as natural an expression for him as music was. He wasn't a voluble talker, either; he would converse with you but his words were plain, thoughtful, and few. (His half-brother Pete has these same tendencies, magnified.) As a musician he didn't strive for virtuosity, but he was a master musician nevertheless, on guitar, banjo, and fiddle; I'm sure he could also play the mandolin but I don't recall him doing so. He delved deeply into traditional musical styles, took them into his playing and was able to demonstrate them at a high level of competence and to show the important differences among musical techniques on the same instrument. Whereas many in the generations of musical revivalists since the 1950s have drifted restlessly from one ethnic musical tradition to another, moving (say) from old-time music to bluegrass to Irish traditional music and then to eastern European music, constantly searching for something new before plumbing the depths of what was at hand, Mike went deeper and deeper into one tradition, old-time music, to the point where he had, by dint of a lifelong combination of learning and playing, taken into himself something of the history of the development of that music, and could bring it out in performance, imagining himself into the musical persona of a rural Georgia fiddler in the 1920s, or a blackfaced minstrel banjo player of the 1850s, or an African American banjo player from the early 1800s.

Sandy Ives took the academic path, but it was not a conventional academic path. His first interest was literature, and he got a job in the English department at the University of Maine in the 1950s; but soon he was enrolled in the folklore PhD program at Indiana University and got his degree after a year of residence there. Back at UMaine he began to focus on teaching and researching and writing about folklore, notably concentrating on the oral traditions in song and story of the state of Maine and nearby Maritime Provinces. He focused on a few long-dead men who had left an important legacy in the oral traditions of poetry, music, and stories: Larry Gorman, Joe Scott, and George Magoon, and he wrote books about all three of them based on his fieldwork with people who remembered these men, sang their songs and told stories about them. His books were published by academic presses, well reviewed, and loved by the folklorists who read them--not many, although when you think of the number of people he touched in his life as a professor for more than 40 years at UMaine, and as a fieldworker who was known throughout the state, his influence becomes far larger than what he was able to achieve through his books, though these books will be his lasting academic legacy, and I believe thatJoe Scott: The Woodsman-Songmaker is one of the most important books about traditional music written in the 20th century. In it he goes against his early training in literature (and mine, be it said) and makes a case, largely implicit, that the popular poetry of songwriters and poets like Joe Scott deserves the appreciation of the cultural historian, and that this popular poetry operates on the basis of a cultural aesthetic that deserves understanding on its own terms.

Sandy didn't continue to pursue a career as a folksinger, but he would gladly sing a song or tell a story in company, the way they used to do a hundred years ago; and he was good at it. His public lectures tended to deal with local Maine traditions, and he was a master of the kind of interpretation that I describe as the peeling of the onion, going deeper and deeper and revealing one layer of meaning beneath another, ever more satisfying to realize how much is there. He taught generations of students who will never forget him, he built up the folklife center at UMaine (now, ironically, endangered in the face of massive university budget cuts), and retired to complete several more book projects. In his few last years he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease, and whether it was this or whatever else it was, it took a terrible physical toll as he was unable to take much nourishment and grew very frail. His mind may have lost the unimportant details of daily life--where did I put those keys?--but almost to the end he was still the wonderful conversationalist he always was, holding "high converse" with me about folklore, fishing, and the sport of tennis for a couple of hours when I visited him and his wife Bobbie in their home only a few weeks before he died.

Two different paths, but maybe not so different after all.

Music and the Sciences (3)

2009-07-30T12:17:00.002-04:00

In her article seeking a rapprochement between ethnomusicologists and brain scientists, my colleague noted that the brain scientist practices reductionism when seeking explanations of human behavior in the chemical and physical activities in the brain, changes in brain states that take place in response to stimuli such as music. These can, to some degree, be measured: this musical sound produces this chemical and physical change in this part of the brain, and may lead to this kind of behavior. In principle it may someday be possible to determine with great accuracy how the matter that makes up human brains both produce and respond to music.

The discovery of the DNA double helix, and the subsequent research on the human genome, is of course an example of the great explanatory power of scientific reductionism, one that has great practical consequences for human life and health. But, as I wrote in my last post, a combination of reductionism and holism seems to be the best strategy for understanding how things work. Here is what I wrote in my response to my colleague’s article: “Consider something as common as driving an automobile. If you notice a strange sound coming from your car, it’s good to know how an automobile works because sometimes you can guess—or test—and figure out what’s wrong. (You wouldn’t take a super-natural explanation seriously here, but you can imagine a group of people who would.) Yet in order to drive we also need to know how to operate the car, we need to know the rules of the road, and at a higher level of organization we need to anticipate what other drivers may do and adjust our driving accordingly. We move among similar strategies when we “do” ethnomusicology. Transcribing and analyzing, we are reductive; in reasoning inductively from ethnographic evidence to arrive at questions about people making music we seek to be comprehensive.”*

How would one formulate holistic questions about music and the brain? These questions would be addressed to the relationship between music, one's consciousness, and one's embodied consciousness (i.e., the body). They take us into questions about the nature of subjectivity and consciousness. We feel as if we have consciousness, we act as if we do, and we have a name for actors who do not have consciousness: zombies. But what is consciousness? Can it be accounted for by explanations at the chemical and physical levels of the brain, or isn’t it rather something that operates at a higher level of organization? The philosopher Thomas Nagel is identified with this viewpoint. His clearest exposition of it came more than 20 years ago: “The subjective features of conscious mental processes—as opposed to their physical causes and effects—cannot be captured by the purified form of thought suitable for dealing with the physical world that underlies the appearances. Not only raw feels [sensations] but also intentional mental states—however objective their content—must be capable of manifesting themselves in subjective form to be in the mind it all.”**

Musical consciousness, in other words, or musicality, as it is sometimes called, cannot be understood fully through a reductionist strategy alone. But scientists are not bound to such a simplistic strategy. As I hinted at the end of my last post, holistic, higher-level organization thinking is what usually generates scientific inferences, ideas, and hypotheses in the first place; and a combination of the two characterizes conservation ecology, which has such profound implications for music and sustainability.

*Jeff Todd Titon, "Ecology, Phenomenology, and Biocultural Thinking," Ethnomusicology, Vol. 53, No. 3 (Fall, 2009), pp. 502-509.

**Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere. New York, Oxford University Press, 1986, p. 16.

Music and the Sciences (2)

2009-06-10T10:59:00.004-04:00

I've titled this series music and the sciences, rather than music and science, because it is telling that we speak both of science as a whole and the sciences as individual parts. Science education usually proceeds one part at a time; we study physics, or we study chemistry, or we study biology, or we study one of the social sciences such as sociology or anthropology.

As I've written here, some conceive of ethnomusicology as a science; Alan Merriam, in discussing an anthropology of music, claimed that ethnomusicology was "sciencing about music" -- that is, studying music as a scientist would study a human phenomenon. Merriam's book, The Anthropology of Music (1964), a period piece now, was influential for a generation and remains today a clear manifesto for a particular kind of ethnomusicology.

Obviously, then, there is science and there are sciences; that is, while individual sciences are different, there is evidently something that all sciences have in common. Often it is said that while the various sciences differ in their subject matter, they share a common method. In other words, while physics is concerned with matter and motion, chemistry with substances and how they interact, and biology with the study of living organisms, all three share something called Scientific Method. In any good high school science course, scientific method is taught along with the subjects of the individual sciences. One learns that scientific method, always identified with controlled testing by means of experiments, consists of a cycle involving, roughly in this order, observation, inference, hypothesis, experimental design and procedure, measurement, results, conclusion--and then further observation, inference, modification of hypothesis, another experiment, and so forth.

Identifying scientific method with the experimental (laboratory) sciences places them at the core of "science" and places experiment at the center of scientific method. This is a move with consequences. First, the core or experimental sciences have become models of "real" or "hard" science--what science aspires to be and do. Those sciences in which conrolled laboratory experiments are difficult, if not impossible, move to the scientific periphery, and their conclusions, unable to be experimentally verified, are thought to be less certain. Second, within the culture of science, experiment is elevated.

The effect of this on the social sciences, where laboratory experiments are difficult, is to orient research in the direction of measurement and quantification, if not toward experiments themselves. Despite late twentieth-century attempts to elevate qualitative methods, the culture of "hard" science moves scientists in the direction of what can be observed, quantified, tested, and measured. College students who wish to study psychology in order to understand human behavior soon find themselves doing laboratory experiments with mice. The ordinary language we use to understand human motives and behavior, such as thinking, intending, wanting, feeling, is thought to be imprecise and therefore unscientific. Consciousness itself is reduced to and understood as the product of the actions of neurons and chemicals in the brain.

Elevating the experimental sciences and Scientific Method in this way generates a crude theory of reductionism. Biology is said to be based in chemistry, and chemistry in physics. Because the universe is composed solely of matter, we could understand everything in it if only we could predict the behavior of its smallest particles. Many high school and college students, whose education in science goes no further, and whose worldview is not based in religious faith, believe in some version of this scientific reductionism; and although they aren't aware of it daily, they continue to hold this belief throughout their adult lives.

But this is not the only way to think about science, and the sciences. Histories of science can turn on many more themes than the progress of experiment and reductionism. One interesting place to look is to the study of what used to be called "natural history." Museums of natural history still exist, a testimony to this older and more holistic way of conceiving of something now called biology.

Most important, a careful look at Scientific Method reveals that the scientist is always moving between the simplification of reductionism (in designing experiments) and the complexity of holism (in drawing inferences). In other words, a more accurate view of experimental science indicates that scientists employ comprehensive, or holistic, strategies as well as reductionist ones. In this way of thinking, the experiment is merely the means, the engineering of the idea that derives from the inference that yields the initial hypothesis. A most important question arises: how are scientific ideas, inferences, and hypotheses generated in the first place--that is, before experiments?

Music and the Sciences (1)

2009-06-01T11:13:00.003-04:00

Toward the end of 2008, the editor of the Journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology asked me if I would write a response, for the journal, of about 3000 words to a major essay by one of my colleagues, on science in ethnomusicology, to be published sometime this year in the journal itself along with the article and two other ethnomusicologists' responses. Although I was already over-committed in research and writing projects, this was the kind of invitation I wanted to accept, and I did so. During the spring much of my time, apart from teaching and various other professorial tasks, I spent thinking about the subject and writing my response.

My colleague's essay was more narrowly focused than the general question of the place of science in music, but that didn't prevent me from taking advantage of the opportunity to think more broadly about the topic. Of course, insofar as sustainability theory draws from conservation ecology, science is right in the thick of thinking about sustainability and music. But first, some background.

Although music is considered one of the arts, in terms of the way learning is divided up in colleges and universities, music may be studied scientifically, and over the centuries it has been regarded from a scientific perspective. In the nineteenth century the science of acoustics, or the physics of sound, was quite ambitious in its reach, more so than today, as it was working, in part, with the heritage of an older European (and before that, Greek) belief system that regarded the mathematics of musical intervals as one key with which to unlock the mysteries of order in the universe. Music was given a more important place in medieval education than today; it was one of the four paths of the knowledge called the quadrivium (four roads), along with the other three: arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. Today, of course, the workings of the universe are explored through particle physics, while the older heritage is regarded as a kind of mysticism; but this does not prevent those who are partial to music from pursuing a path from music to more general knowledge.

The early ethnomusicologists, who called themselves comparative musicologists, applied science to the study of music in a variety of ways, using nineteenth-century models of scientific procedure. Taking their cues from the discipline of philology (what we would call comparative linguistics today), itself much in debt to Darwin's ideas concerning evolution, they asked questions about the origins and diffusion of music, and they sought to gather adequate scientific evidence in order to formulate and test hypotheses concerning music as a pan-human activity. Some of the early ethnomusicologists, such as Carl Stumpf, were trained as scientists; they came to music as a test case for the more general theories they were interested in. I hope to write more about Stumpf and music psychology in a later post.

In any event, as the twentieth century turned, many comparative musicologists singled out the phonograph (which could make recordings, not just play them back) as a scientific instrument that would permit a recording to be played back any number of times so that a trained transcriber could write down the tones in musical notation. The phonograph recording offered a movement in the direction of scientific objectivity, and experimental replicability, as more than one transcriber might have a go at rendering a musical performance in notation. The notation itself, easily read by a trained musician, came to stand for the musical object, one which could be (and was) subjected to description, classification, analysis, and comparison (with other genres, and with the products of other musical cultures). The comparative musicologists hoped for success along the lines of the philologists triumphs in terms of the description, comparison, and history of languages; but for a variety of reasons they were unable to duplicate the success of linguistics; and by the middle of the twentieth century, ethnomusicologists began turning to additional, more promising, and seemingly more interesting goals.

My colleague's paper was addressed to the question of what ethnomusicologists could learn from brain scientists, and vice-versa. That is, what can we learn from brain scientists about music and human behavior? It seems like a natural, and important question to ask; in fact, the general public is interested, and the success of popular books on the topic such as This Is Your Brain on Music, and the writings of the scientist Oliver Sacks, testifies to that interest. But, as my colleague pointed out, ethnomusicologists had largely abandoned this question in the last third of the twentieth century, for various reasons, as ethnomusicology increasingly began to employ the methods of the human sciences, taking what in anthropology has been called an "interpretive turn," away from analysis (which breaks a whole down into parts) and toward a more holistic approach based on the culture concept: music as culture, music as performance, music as identity, music as power, etc. The musical object had given way to the musical subject: no longer were musical transcriptions at the center, but instead the person (subject) making music was the focus of attention.

The Ethnomusicology editor had asked me, he said, to respond to my colleague's hope for a new, or at least, additional, direction for ethnomusicologists, because I had written before about this "interpretive turn" and because my own work exemplified it. I was invested in it. He thought (and may have hoped) that I would be skeptical about a new "scientific turn" but of course I could write whatever I wanted to on the subject. At the same time, he knew that since the 1970s I've also pursued science as a way of thinking about certain ethnomusicological questions, whether in developing a generative grammar of blues melody, or in pursuing ecology as a way of thinking about musical cultures and sustainability. He knew I was interested in considering both scientific and interpretive approaches to music; and he's right: I am.

Well then, what of this particular instance? In her essay my colleague wrote about an experiment that she did, in which she asked whether brain science could reveal something in common among religious ecstatics who fall into trance when involved with music, and those people she calls "deep listeners," those who, although not necessarily religious, are greatly affected by music, to the point where they seek peak musical experiences that result in such responses as chills and tears. For her, interest in science has been latent; her own "scientific turn" came a decade or so ago. But she found that, without scientific credentials, she could not get funding for the experiment, and ultimately was refused publication in the appropriate scientific journal. And so the editor of Ethnomusicology agreed to publish it, with an added call for a rapprochement between scientific and humanistic ethnomusicologists, and the responses from three of her colleagues. This special issue of the Journal will appear later in the current calendar year. More on all this in the next post.

Ecology, Economy, and Music

2009-04-19T09:59:00.009-04:00

Donald Worster's book, Nature's Economy, introduced me to the history of ecological thought. I read it in the late 1970s in preparation for teaching an American studies course, "Ecology and History in America," team-taught with an anthropologist, a biologist, and a literary historian. At about that time I was forming my idea that musical cultures could be regarded as ecosystems, and wrote it into the first chapter of the first edition of Worlds of Music (1984), and each of the four subsequent editions (1992, 1996, 2001, 2009). In recent years I've come to see an opposition between ecology and economy, or at least a commodity-based economy; and it was in the back of my mind as I wrote yesterday about stage-readiness. What does thinking about an economy of nature yield? Worster didn't explore the phrase that lent the book it's title, but it is well worth looking into.

To formulate the problem as clearly as I can, then. Diversity, whether biological or cultural, has a clear advantage for adapting to changing circumstances. For the future, therefore, we should place a value on encouraging this diversity, which means conserving species and protecting habitat, whether biological or cultural. That is an ecological first principle, and it is a principle of equity, for diversity requires the survival of all, or as many as possible. But a consumer-driven, commodity-based economy tends toward specialization, professionalization and concentration of like products, whether in agriculture (monoculture instead of mixed farming), or industry, or art--or wealth, for that matter. Concentration is the opposite of diversity and is disadvantaged for adaptation and thus disadvantaged for sustainability, whether biological or cultural. Musical sustainability is well served, then, by diversity, and ill served by thinking of music as an economic commodity.

Economy comes from two Greek words: oikos (house) and nemein (manage). There are, of course, other kinds of economies besides global corporate capitalism, which is a generally accepted description of our current economic system. "Natural economy," or Naturalwirtschaft, was coined by German economists to describe a situation in which barter rather than the exchange of money characterized most transactions, and they attributed this economy to the European Middle Ages. Of course, a barter economy still places a commodity value on work and production; but barter requires the presence of owners to barter goods and services, whereas global capitalism operates impersonally. In a barter economy the lines of responsibility, legal and moral, are clearly traced to particular human beings. In an economy based on corporate capitalism, the owners are not held legally responsible for the corporation's activities. Government officials, while subject in their personal lives to the same laws as anyone else, are not held legally accountable for actions taken by the government.

The current economic crisis is a natural outcome of global corporate capitalism's need for continuous growth. Whereas ecology teaches us that there are limits to growth, our economic system is dependent on ever-accelerating growth. We are told we must spend our way out of this crisis. The gross national product must not continue to shrink. We must avoid deflation. The new idea is that we can grow the green economy. But continuous growth as conceived under current economic conditions, whether green or not, relies on leveraging capital and creates a house of cards, a giant Ponzi scheme that makes us all vulnerable.

I recall my puzzlement when as a child I was told that the bank I put my meagre savings in did not keep the money I had deposited. Instead, they loaned it out; indeed, they loaned more money than they had. How could that be? Only if everyone paid back their loans, I was told, which they are legally required to do. Now, of course, there is another kind of payback; some loans are considered "toxic" and people are "under water" with their payments: that is, their commodities, on which they owe money, are worth less than the money they owe. This is the outcome, every so often, of an economy predicated on continuous growth: boom and bust. As my friend Hap Collins said, "You can only blow up a ballon so big until it bursts."

There is another way to think of "nature's economy." What, as Wes Jackson would say, would it be like to model our economy after nature? Of course, that depends on how we view or construct nature's economy; but there is no natural economy without human beings, not now. We are in nature interactively; the question is how will we manage that interaction in the biocultural world. An economy based on diversity, limited growth, interconnectedness, and stewardship may be inefficient in the short term, but in the long term it is sustainable whereas the other is not. The same holds for music. Heritage tourism involving music, insofar as it commodifies the product, is implicated in the wrong kind of economy. Instead, sustainability of musical cultures requires, as I have stated before, the application of those four principles and the gradual replacement of the idea that music is a commodity with the notion that it is an act as natural as speaking or breathing.

Stage Readiness, Economics, and Diversity

2009-04-18T22:34:00.004-04:00

In my previous post on stage readiness I referenced one of the axioms of musical sustainability: that just as biodiversity hedges species bets and aids adaptation, so a diversity of musical cultures possesses adaptational value. The greater the diversity, the better chance to adapt to changing circumstances. Heritage sites also value diversity, not for adaptational value, but on the grounds of cultural equity. Yet, as I showed in my previous post, the criterion of stage readiness works against diversity. Stage readiness belongs to the realm of economics, and arises from the idea that the tourists deserve a good show (even if, as is the case in some heritage sites, they don't have to pay for it.)

But just as local ecosystems are disturbed by economic development projects, so local musical cultures are impacted by heritage decisions driven by economic considerations. Such decisions place a cash value on musical exchanges among people. The people are led to think music is a commodity, even in those musical cultures that feature amateurs who make music "for the love of it" and who would prefer to think of music as a gift.

If the product of a musical exchange is sold and bought, if music is a commodity, its adaptational value diminishes. Professionalism, competition, and virtuosity become sought after. Participation among the general public diminishes. Instead of regarding music-making as a human activity like language, something that everyone does without thinking much about it, a commodity-driven musical culture views music as a specialized activity requiring talent. Instead of music as a reflex, an activity in the world as natural as breathing, music becomes a privilege and requires training.

But the commodified musical product, now bought and sold in the marketplace, is fragile. It requires protection under copyright law. It requires expensive gear. It divides people into classes: musicians, consumers, those who are indifferent, and those who are deemed non-musical. Deemed, damaged, and doomed. Adaptationally this is a disadvantage, clearly, when so much apparatus is required to support music-making, and when only a portion of the population is able to engage in it. Those who are directing efforts in musical sustainability would do well to consider these negative consequences of decisions based in economics rather than ecology.

Stage Readiness and Heritage

2009-04-18T17:15:00.004-04:00

Heritage presentations at festivals, museums, and other interpretive centers require that traditional performers be "stage ready," which in heritage parlance means that they be able to satisfy the tourist audience. This requirement rules out certain tradition-bearers, of course: those who are not used to presenting their traditions to strangers from a stage. Indeed, entire musical traditions exist apart from stage presentations; to represent them as heritage is to transform them.

I heard the term "stage ready" -- not for the first time -- when I brought to the attention of festival programmers a certain Native American musician, a long-time acquaintance of mine, a community scholar and activist who is considered a tradition bearer within his own group. To me, the most important consideration was that Native Americans had been under-represented at this festival, considering their history and contemporary presence in the region. Riding the horse of cultural equity, I was comfortable making this argument to people I assumed had the same commitment. I was puzzled why, if they were committed to representing ethnic diversity, they had not included Native Americans; but I assumed it was because they didn't know how to approach them. Well, I knew a Native musician with impeccable credentials and thought that all I would need to do was bring him to their attention and the match would be made.

Not so fast. "Is he stage-ready?" I was asked. Later I learned that they had tried to arrange for his appearance at the festival some years ago, but he had unaccountably refused at the last minute. There was some kind of mis-communication. I thought I knew what it must have been: he didn't know the festival programmers, and he wasn't entirely comfortable with the situation. Trust borne of friendship was important to him, and there was no one there he could trust.

"Is he stage-ready?" The programmers surely must be aware, I thought, that Native Americans staged performances among themselves. Powwows were the most conspicuous example of public music and dance; these could easily be transported into this festival context. In a sense powwows were festivals already. But I could imagine the possibility that these programmers, even though they were aware of powwows, held a certain stereotype about Native Americans as relatively closed societies, or even that they would somehow be innocent of the kind of staged presentations typical of folk festivals and unable to translate their traditional song and dance to the folk festival context. Thus: "Is he stage-ready?"

In fact, he was stage-ready, and I said so. He had been presenting for colleges and universities and at folk festivals on and off for 25 years. He was a superb spokesperson to non-Native groups. But I hoped that if he performed at this festival he would attract a Native group and aim his presentation as much at them as at the non-Native audience. (This is, in fact, what transpired.) It turned out he was more than stage-ready. Later this year he and his musical partner will sing at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.

But that's not the point. The point is what the criterion of stage-readiness does to heritage presentations in the service of musical and cultural sustainability. It prevents certain musicians and groups, some who do not perform or consider what they are doing as performance, from transferring their activities easily to the festival stage. Of course, there are those who can make this transition, and those who can do so without much compromise. I have seen it with Old Regular Baptist singers; I have even presented them at festivals. But there are many who cannot.

And so as a site encouraging musical sustainability, in somewhat mysterious fashion by representation from the stage, the heritage presentation favors certain kinds of musical cultures and works against others. To make an analogy with the older kinds of conservation efforts, it is as if certain species or populations are singled out for preservation while others, perhaps more endangered, are left to fend for themselves.

Cultural Sustainability

2009-03-31T18:33:00.003-04:00

Inspired partly by the meeting last December at Goucher College where a group of us consulted on a proposed new M.A. degree in cultural sustainability, three of my colleages and I are proposing a panel on the subject for a conference next fall. I had thought, at first, to examine heritage from a sustainability standpoint, but I changed my mind to a more theory-oriented topic, in an attempt to think further through some of the issues involved in bringing conservation biology to the musical (and cultural) sustainability discourse. This is timely because I've also been asked to write an essay for Ethnomusicology in which I respond to an article which advocates for scientific approaches within ethnomusicology and gives an example of an experiment done on groups of music listeners. More on that soon. For now, here is the abstract that I proposed for the conference paper:

An Ecological Approach to Cultural Sustainability

Attention to four principles from conservation biology, namely diversity, limits to growth, interconnectivity, and stewardship, will lead cultural policymakers and participatory action researchers to better best practices in cultural sustainability. I will illustrate this thesis with observations drawn from my experiences with musical communities built around spirit and place (such as the old time string band revival and the Old Regular Baptists of southeastern Kentucky); and with ecological case studies (such as land use and misuse in the upland South, fishing and overfishing in eastern Penobscot Bay, Maine, and conventional versus organic farming and orcharding). I wish to move beyond the nature/culture dichotomy and towards a biocultural synthesis that would help culture workers understand the dynamics of expressive culture in human communities within the natural world.

Conservation biology provides scientific reasons for opposition to strip-mining and mountaintop removal in the upland South, in terms of the ecological disturbances and natural disasters that follow on; here principles of diversity and limits to growth obtain. The severe cutbacks in fish and of the fishery off the coast of New England are well known; not so well known are the stewardship efforts of local fishermen in eastern Penobscot Bay to utilize oral histories and determine spawning grounds, thereby to make a case for selectively opening certain fishing areas instead of closing them all off and the fishing industry with it. The organic farming motto—feed the soil, not the plant—metaphorically suggests ways in which cultural sustainability may come about through efforts to sustain the interconnected conditions under which expressive cultures flourish.

Located within the coal-mining regions of central Appalachia, Old Regular Baptists are relatively non-diverse in terms of place and the possible economies there, and also class, occupation, and age, making them more vulnerable to disturbances than a more diverse population would be; old-time string band revivalists are diverse geographically and occupationally, but not especially diverse in terms of age and class. The face-to-face communication necessary to the culture of both groups is not endangered by population growth but will be affected by the growth and change in media such as the internet. Interconnectivity is strong in both groups and is strengthened by institutions such as festivals and the ways of visiting. Stewardship coming from leaders within the groups has been important in conserving both the old-time music revival and Old Regular Baptist music and culture, but it is more centralized and thus vulnerable among Old Regular Baptists. Understanding how these four principles—diversity, limits to growth, interconnectedness, and stewardship—operate biologically and culturally offers hope for a biocultural synthesis that will enable culture workers to plan in partnership with indigenous groups to promote cultural sustainability.

What Is Music

2009-02-06T10:36:00.006-05:00

"Music," for the ethnomusicologist, is humanly organized sound--which is to say that music is sound that people, any people, all people, organize, whether classical music composers or children singing while playing games on the street, whether an orchestra playing a Beethoven symphony or a group of BaAka women in Africa hocketing their voices.

"Music," for the philosopher, is taken to be classical music, the music of the European-American high art tradition. Other musics are not under consideration. In its finest expression classical music is taken to be music for its own sake, without external purpose. It pleases the senses and the intellect but it has no meaning apart from the way its structure unfolds, no usefulness except as an object of delight. Here I want to critique that argument further than I did in my last blog post.

In the past few decades a number of university professors with an interest in music and philosophy have taken up questions involving music and asethetics, publishing essays and books on the subject of what music "is" and how music "works." The first difficulty with their argument is that their musical examples are taken from a small and atypical kind of humanly organized sound, i.e., classical music only.

Peter Kivy will serve as a representative of these philosopher-aestheticians who write about music. In his book Music, Language, and Cognition (Oxford, 2007), Kivy, a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University, takes pains to show that music is not a language. He writes: "Music is, indeed, language-like in certain respects. Nevertheless, it is not language; it is not a language or part of a language. And thinking it is any one of these things has caused a good deal of confusion" (p. 214).

To try to make his point, Kivy determines that he will "be solely concerned with absolute music--that is to say, pure instrumental music, without text, title, or program" (214). In narrowing his concerns to absolute music, Kivy ignores most popular music, most folk music, most music outside of Euro-American classical music, and even much music within the Euro-American canon, which is to say music with words, title, or program. Indeed, prior to the Baroque, most European classical music did carry words. This is like saying we are going to talk about human life on this planet, but we're only going to consider life in Chicago from 1800 to 1950; or that we're going to talk about vegetables, but we're only going to consider cucumbers. Such a narrowing disqualifies one from generalizing about vegetables, life on this planet, or music.

Further, we might ask what Kivy's word "pure" is contributing to his conception. For "pure" means uncontaminated, and the suggestion in Kivy's remark is that text, title, or program makes instrumental music impure or contaminated, a lesser object or experience than absolute music. "Pure" lets us know something about Kivy's prejudices underlying his program. We can find out more about his prejudices by attending to his phrase "exotic jangle" in the following sentence: "But if I am completely unacquainted with the music of southern India, and I am enjoying the exotic jangle of the instruments while eating a curry in an Indian restaurant, I am neither enjoying nor appreciating the music" (p. 217). True enough, but the "exotic jangle" gives Kivy's orientalism free play here. Kivy's ignorance is also on display: "Someone brought up in China understands Chinese music but not the music of Haydn or Mozart" (p. 215). Evidently he is unaware that in China, as in Japan, Western music (classical as well as popular) is pervasive, and he is uninformed about the great classical music conservatories in Beijing and elsewhere. An educated "someone brought up in China" would understand, as well as an educated Westerner, structure in the music of Haydn or Mozart. Kivy's musical blindness here follows from cultural blindness and ultimately from the decision to focus exclusively on "absolute music" in the Euro-American classical music tradition. "Absolute" is rightly trumped by "relative" in this case.

Kivy is particularly interested in what it means to understand music, and he equates understanding with appreciation and enjoyment as the composer intended (p. 217). This conclusion is debatable on a number of grounds. Equating the meaning of an art object or experience with what the artist intended places too rigid limits on meaning because artists aren't consciously aware of their full intentions. It also gives them, and not performers or listeners, sole authority over meaning. We don't accept that kind of authority from government spokespersons or advertisers; why should we cede it to composers? Of course, it's helpful to know what the composer intended. But that is all it is: what the composer intended. And just as what the advertiser intends isn't the meaning of the ad, so what the composer intends isn't the meaning of a musical performance. Besides, an interpretative community will interpret art according to its current interests, biases, and understandings, regardless of the artist's original intent. And what happens when it is the case that the music is not intended as an art object to be enjoyed and appreciated, but as something else--let us say, as an experience of the divine?

I'm perplexed that Kivy, and a number of other philosophers interested in music and aesthetics, pursue the question "What is music" without attending to music as it is made and understood throughout the world. I am perplexed that such a narrow and narrow-minded view is endorsed by publication in prestigious academic journals and presses such as Oxford University Press, which only two years ago published Kivy's book.

Decades ago when asking the question What is music, I turned to aesthetic philosophical discourse thinking it would be helpful, but I was disappointed. I am disappointed still. The question remains. And the ethnomusicologist's answer, that music is "humanly organized sound" tells us something about music, but not all we want to know. It is a good beginning but there is more to it than this.

Is Music Useless?

2009-01-21T21:02:00.003-05:00

In the discourse over music and sustainability, one of the important questions is "What is music for?" This question is related to the larger question, "What is music," but the ethnomusicologist's answer to that one, "Music is humanly organized sound," isn't controversial. What is controversial concerns the purposes of music, for many defenders of the arts believe in "art for art's sake," which is to say that arts have no instrumental purpose, no usefulness, beyond the aesthetic pleasure a person experiences when understanding and appreciating great art. And so the job of the artist is to create, of the art critic and historian to evaluate and help interpret, and of the consumer or receiver to gain pleasure. Some say the experience of great art is ennobling, that it raises one's spirit to undertand and appreciate the masterful achievement of great art in terms of its wondrous structure or its meaning (or both). The result is the arts appreciation industry, with everything from concerts and recordings and museum displays and architectural monuments, historic preservation, and college courses that teach appreciation, discrimination, and taste, leading to patronage.

Of course, the art for art's sake argument concerns only the "fine" arts. Popular and folk arts are thought to be sullied by purpose: the popular arts are commodified, the purpose is to sell objects to consumers; the folk arts have "functions" such as community bonding, and so forth. But this is not regarded as great art. Popular and folk music are granted, in this view, usefulness; but the high arts are somehow pure in their intentionality, freed from external purpose to be themselves alone.

As an ethnomusicologist, I am willing to let the apologists for the so-called fine arts make their arguments, even though I think they are weak. But I want to stop them when they take classical music as their only case in point. Throughout the world, music is purposeful in ritual; it opens a channel to and mediates with the divine world: it communicates from the human to the divine, whether a Christian hymn of praise or a Kaluli weeping song about birds. Any song is a powerful marriage of semantic meaning (through its words) with complementary sounds that take on the meaning of the words. True, some classical music is "absolute," free from words and the human voice, made only on musical instruments, and without apparent use except as an aesthetic experience. Yet much classical music involves this marriage of words and melody. Bach would have been puzzled to hear a philosopher praise his music as useless. While it is true that his fugues and suites are examples of absolute music, his cantatas and masses are not: they are vocal, purposeful, and semantically meaningful. In fact, for most of classical music's history, vocal music was dominant. Thus the circular argument that is sometimes advanced in defense of absolute music, that it is a fine art and therefore not subject to the purposes and functions that compromise the pure aesthetic experience of popular or folk music, does not even hold for all classical music. Some music, then, may appear useless; but most is meant to be useful. Is it all worth sustaining?

Familar Institutions

2009-01-17T18:28:00.003-05:00

The festschrift piece is done. Looking at a couple of musical revivals--old-time Appalachian string band music, and New England contradance music--and the institutions these revivalist musicians and dancers created to sustain them, without external support and beyond merely getting together to make music and dance, I realized that they rely on the familiar, such as the school, the newsletter, the internet (not familiar to all) and the summer music camp to pass it along. That's not surprising, as these white collar folks are capable bureaucratic managers and these familiar institutions can be run by them without much difficulty and with the kind of cameraderie that keeps the community going, so long as there's enough money to keep them going. At the same time, they build in alternatives to middle-class schooling more in keeping with the traditional cultures as they have experienced them; for instance, musical instruction tends to be by ear and imitation, rather than the method book and note reading of childhood piano or violin lessons.

Musical cultures without heritage managers

2009-01-05T20:36:00.002-05:00

In the midst, now, of writing a short invited essay to appear in a festchrift for-- well, I'd mention the name of the ethnomusicologist except that there's a chance someone might see it and tip the person off. This one takes up the subject of communities that manage their own musical cultures without external patronage and arts management. These turn out chiefly to be musical revivalists. And the managers are middle-aged, upper middle-class. Usually they strummed a guitar or banjo earlier in life and now that their careers are over or nearly so, they are looking for meaning in other kinds of activities, musical and social. To these revivials they bring their managerial skills, some quite formidable, along with other middle-class attributes--such as the collector mentality, which may result in the accumulation of musical instruments instead of art work or antiques.

Ethnomusicology, cultural policy, and change

2008-12-23T17:18:00.017-05:00

From time to time we hear predictions about the death of music. Of course, music is a hard-wired human activity, and like language, it is not in any danger of disappearing. What these predictions mean is that certain kinds of musical languages and practices as the author knows them are threatened. Predictions of the death of blues have come regularly almost since it first came to notice in the common culture during the 1920s. Predictions of the death of classical music have come regularly for hundreds of years. Neither has died; both have changed.

In the past century or so, formal music education and the institutions associated with it have exerted more and more influence on music as it is heard, known, understood, and practiced. Any exploration of music and sustainability needs to take these institutions and their influence into account. But it is a complex subject, worthy of far more reflection than can be published here.

My little corners of the educational institutions associated with music are called ethnomusicology and folklore. These are educational "disciplines," which does not mean that they enforce rules on their members, but rather that those who practice them more or less agree on their particular subject and method. Some years ago I wrote that I thought the subject of ethnomusicology was "the study of people making music, all over the world." That definition has gained wide acceptance within the discipline. This begs the question of how ethnomusicology studies its subject but the fact is that ethnomusicologists bring many methods--humanistic, anthropological, scientific, psychological, cognitive, philosophical, and so forth--to the study of people making music. Ethnomusicologists, in other words, use all the means that scholars employ to study people; and in addition, to study musical structure, we use the method of musical analysis, which to some outside the guild is unfamilar because of the way music is written.

Folkore, also, admits of similar methods. Academic folklorists regard it as the study of people's expressive culture, which involves artistic and aesthetic communication in small groups and in everyday life. Burt Feintuch's introduction to the volume, Eight Words for the Study of Expressive Culture, defines expressive culture as ". . . processes, emotions and ideas bound up in . . . forms and performances in everyday life."

This emphasis on everyday aesthetic experience is an evolved subject for folklore, for in the 18th and 19th centuries folklore's subject was "popular antiquities," and for most of the 20th century its subject was the study of oral tradition, as expressed by the "folk" in their songs, stories, and other verbal art, along with customs, pageants, and crafts (including vernacular architecture, painting, even farming). As the 20th century wore on, the term "folk" became problematic, looking, as it did, condescendingly toward a group of peasants or a proletariat characterized by functional illiteracy and marginality. Academic folklorists felt that our subject was disappearing; hence its reinvention, or revision, since the 1970s, into the performance of expressive culture.

The public, on the other hand, still regards folklore with some nostalgia as the quaint, the false, and the outmoded. Folklore as expressive culture has not gained any traction with the general public, and may never do so. Similarly, the general public wrongly thinks of ethnomusicology as the study of ethnic music. Of course, ethnomusicologists do study the music of ethnic groups, but that is limiting; ethnomusicologists also study the music of non-ethnic groups. As "ethnos" in ethnomusicology is from the Greek word for people, ethnomusicology is the study of people making music.

Folklore and ethnomusicology occupy very small spaces in the colleges, universities, schools of music, and music conservatories that are involved in activities sustaining music. We might generalize and say that while most of the educators in these institutions sustain music through teaching and practicing (composing and performing) it, folklorists and ethnomusicologists in the academy are at one remove from this, with a few of us thinking about how music is, has been, and can be, sustained--today usually through what is called cultural policy. Some also practice cultural policy; that is, some academic ethnomusicologists and folklorists are involved with agencies that make and apply cultural policy, and with communities that are the intended beneficiaries. Such ethnomusicologists are called applied ethnomusicologists; the thrust of this work is outside of the university, in the public sphere. Such folklorists are called public folklorists, for similar reasons. In fact, many applied ethnomusicologists, and most public folklorists, are employed outside of the academic world; they are culture workers, not professors. And so applied ethnomusicologists apply what they've learned from the study of people making music, to cultural policy involving music all over the world. Increasingly this cultural policy turns on sustainability.

Preservation, conservation, protection and safeguarding are often used to describe the aims of cultural policies meant to prevent threatened musics from becoming extinct. Usually these musics are called heritage, presumably giving them added value. What does it mean for a music to become extinct? Are we speaking of music cultures dying? Most often the alarm bell is raised over particular musical genres, such as blues, or categories of musical practice, such as classical music. But as I wrote above, these change. Music cultures effect genre changes; this is how music grows. Categories of musical practice are more difficult to sustain, as the music cultures that do the particular practice appear endangered.

The constitution of heritage

2008-12-10T22:24:00.000-05:00

In 1993 I wrote the following about the blues revival of the 1960s: "Those of us who participated in the revival thought we had discovered an object called blues, which we then set out to think about, document, analyze, and in some cases, perform. Instead, by our interpretive acts, we constructed the very thing we thought we had found."* The same is true of music when it is sustained as cultural heritage. It's not new in 2008 to think about heritage as made, not found; but it is no less relevant now than it was in 1993. The paradox is that the heritage industry behaves as if heritage is discovered, not constructed; and then it sets about to construct (or constitute) a representation of what it supposes it has discovered.

A related post on this blog is "The paradox of authenticity."

*Jeff Todd Titon, "Reconstructing the Blues: Reflections on the 1960s Blues Revival," in Transforming Tradition, ed. Neil Rosenberg. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993, pp. 222-223.

Sustainability and Property Law

2008-11-05T21:15:00.000-05:00

Returning from the annual Society for Ethnomusicology conference, I was struck again by the way the discourse over intangible cultural heritage (aka folklore) and cultural policy is still dominated by the question, "who owns culture?" Because most of the conference panels were devoted to professors and graduate students presenting their ethnographic-based research on a variety of music throughout the world, cultural policy was not a major theme; yet it was not absent, as many of the applied ethnomusicology panels and papers took it up in one form or another. My colleague Marc Perlman, who took a year off from teaching to attend law school, contrasted two approaches to intangible cultural heritage policy: stewardship and ownership. WIPO operates in the area of ownership (copyright law) whereas UNESCO takes more of a stewardship approach (in theory, at least). In my thinking on the subject I've been supportive of stewardship initiatives and skeptical of promoting ownership and property rights as a means toward sustainability. Yet there is no denying that without legal ownership of their cultural heritage, indigenous peoples have been/will be exploited for their music, medical knowledge, etc. Probably I've been too idealistic in avoiding thinking through ownership because I have misgivings about art as commodity. But sustainability thinking, I still believe, tilts towards stewardship. Considering ownership, I wrote in my essay for The World of Music that Emerson's poem "Hamatreya" reveals that the farmers whose names are on the Concord gravestones mistakenly thought they owned the land they worked. They had the deeds to it--for a time--but the poet observes from the names on the stones that the land owns them.

Special issue nears completion

2008-09-30T20:33:00.001-04:00

Yesterday the last essay, Turino's, revised, came across my transom. Today after reading it I put a few finishing touches on my guest editor's introduction and by the end of this week I will have the special issue on music and sustainability off to the editor of The World of Music. Altogether it's a strong issue, with contributions in diverse areas of theory and practice. Turino's essay proposes four fields of music-making, including presentational (virtuoso performance before an audience) and participatory; Faux's essay is a case study of Don Roy's involvement with Franco-American music in Maine; Topp-Fargion proposes a newer, holistic way of thinking about sound archives and their relation to music-cultures; Wilcken describes how "payola" funds were diverted in New York State to support community music-making; DeWitt's essay is a case study of the Creole/Cajun music and dance scene in the San Francisco Bay area; and mine applies four principles of ecology to cultural management policy regarding music: diversity, limits to growth, connectedness, and stewardship. All are concerned with issues involving the sustainability of music in culture. The journal issue should be published sometime in 2009.

In the writing process, which has gone on now for more than two years, I've generated enough to fill a book, although it's not organized very well at this point. It's possible that I will move in that direction, as I see in outline how it could take shape; but there are areas where I need to do more reading and research--I'm not ready to write it yet, or to give up the topic either. And so this blog will continue.